tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28877787713405174292024-02-06T22:18:36.039-08:00A New Left BlogSteven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-91346302287192008212016-01-16T17:18:00.001-08:002016-02-02T12:52:17.328-08:00Books I'm Glad I Read in 2015<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/books/2014/12/141201_BOOKS_EmpireCottonCOVER.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/books/2014/12/141201_BOOKS_EmpireCottonCOVER.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></a></div>
Having a two year old in the house is a joy in many ways, but not exactly conducive to serious reading, so I was pleased to find a baker's dozen of titles I read in 2015 and consider worth sharing. All of them in their way touch on important topics worthy of the time of general readers; not all is lost to academic specialization.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Global-Transformation-Modernity-International-Relations/dp/1107630800/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453240343&sr=8-1&keywords=global+transformation+buzan" target="_blank">The Global Transformation</a>--Barry Buzan and George Lawson. Addressed to international relations scholars, this book neatly summarizes the 19th century emergence, 20th century consolidation, and 21st century beginnings of the supercession of a highly unequal world with a core whose economic and military advantages enabled it to organize the world for close to 200 years. Looking ahead, they see an end to superpowers and consequential growth of regionalism, but fail to consider whether mass struggles or a terminal crisis of capitalism might further reshape the world.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-History-White-House-Lights/dp/0872865320/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453240375&sr=8-1&keywords=black+history+of+the+white+house" target="_blank">Black History of the White House</a> by Clarence Lusane. Simultaneously a social history of the various slaves, musicians, dressmakers, secret service agents, cabinet members and others who constituted an African American presence among the presidents and a history of those presidents' efforts (or, mostly, not) to grapple with racism, this is a fresh optic to examine that most over-discussed aspect of American history, the executive branch. Also offers a new way of looking at Obama by setting him in a lengthy line of African American presidential candidates. I don't understand why Eartha Kitt was left out, tho.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Soul-America-History-Culture/dp/022625450X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453240409&sr=8-1&keywords=a+war+for+the+soul+of+america" target="_blank">A War for the Soul of America</a>--Andrew Hartman. Reading Hartman's tour of the Culture Wars of the last three decades of the twentieth century is a little headache inducing--like reading one after another of those annoying Facebook squabbles constantly cropping up. Still, somebody had to sort it out and put it together in one place. And the discussion of how Christian conservatism became ecumenical in the seventies is particularly useful. Right and wrong that the culture wars have been superseded by class divisions in the last few years.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radicals-America-Cambridge-Essential-Histories/dp/052173133X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453595859&sr=8-1&keywords=radicals+in+America" target="_blank">Radicals in America: The US Left Since the Second World War</a>--Christopher Phelps and Howard Brick. Here is a topic you don't see books about everyday--a history of the post-war left in the United States. Covers a lot of terrain, much of it likely to be familiar to those who closely follow left politics. Particularly good at rendering the seventies as an open moment that faded, although it doesn't quite capture the craziness that prevailed in many circles then. Misses a number of things, including the MOVE bombing and the US Social Forum. And adopts a testy tone about the limits of Occupy Wall Street. But again, very useful to put it all in one place.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Acquiescence-American-Resistance-Organized/dp/0316185434/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453595932&sr=1-1&keywords=the+age+of+aquiesence" target="_blank">The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power</a>--Steve Fraser. Ambitious effort to order American history through a stark comparison of two gilded ages, the one in the nineteenth century, when American industry was ascending and workers ferociously fought back, and the more recent one, which he (at least partly) accurately describes as an age of auto-cannibalism, when worker fight back has been largely absent. I think he overstates the "acquiesence" (between the introduction and conclusion of this book, obviously conceived during the tea party ascendancy, he is scrambling to make sense of Occupy, de Blasio, etc. irrelevant blips? neo-populism?) and overemphasizes ideological reasons for the difference, but well worth reading for its descriptions of class struggle in the nineteenth century.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Acquiescence-American-Resistance-Organized/dp/0316185434/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453595932&sr=1-1&keywords=the+age+of+aquiesence" target="_blank">The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement</a>--Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky. A thoughtful history from a participant grad student. Highlights the contradictions of the 99% utopia. I would like to hear more about encampments beyond New York (and a little Oakland) but that is what the next generation of grad students is for, I guess.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Proletariat-Digitial-Barricades-Interventions-Politics/dp/0745334032/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453596070&sr=1-1&keywords=cyber+proletariat" target="_blank">Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labor in the Digital Vortex</a>--Nick Dyer Witheford. Pretty solid walk through of the political economy of the internet and its implications. Uses the autonomist theme that demands from below and struggle spur new forms of capitalist development--hence social media fulfills the demand that content be free while turning this into something worth billions. Read it yourself to understand why it is not a question of accelerating, but of swerving to a better place.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=To+make+men+free" target="_blank">To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party</a>--Heather Cox Richardson--This history identifies three points in American history when Republican party presidents played an important reform role--Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower--is that last one a bit of a stretch? Could it happen again? Seems unlikely to me.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Global-Unions-Local-Power-Transnational/dp/0801478626/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454207545&sr=1-1&keywords=global+unions+local+power" target="_blank">Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing</a>--Jamie McCallum Closely observed study of the practice of transnational unionism, which depicts a more complicated global role for SEIU than the neoliberal-union-leftists-love-to-hate would lead one to expect.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crucibles-Black-Empowerment-Neighborhood-Washington/dp/022613069X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454207591&sr=1-1&keywords=crucibles+of+black+empowerment" target="_blank">Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago's Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington</a>-- Jeffrey Helgeson. Detailed history of the ecology of African American organizations in Chicago over many decades. Helps to clarify the complex political and ideological terrain out of which such social movement and political highpoints as the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition and the Harold Washington campaign emerge.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Disciplining-Terror-Experts-Invented-Terrorism/dp/1107697344/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454207683&sr=1-1&keywords=disciplining+terror" target="_blank">Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism"</a>-- Lisa Stampnitzky. This run through of the various academic and journalist discussions of terrorism since the 1970s, when the term took hold in the United States, has a bit of a surprise ending. The political class in the US pretty much doesn't care about those debates, raising questions about the "power" aspect of "power/knowledge" in the social sciences in general.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Cotton-History-Sven-Beckert/dp/0375713964/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454207743&sr=1-1&keywords=empire+of+cotton" target="_blank">Empire of Cotton: A Global History</a>-- Sven Beckert. If there were a Pitchfork for left leaning academics with a social science historical bent (and why isn't there?) I bet this would top the best of the year list. Not just an excellent history of the production and distribution of cotton; also offers a more general framework for the history of capitalism--from an early phase when capitalists were unified with war making, to the industrial period, to the contemporary period, when capitalists no longer need to pledge allegiance to any particular state.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Deep-State-Democracy-Library/dp/1442214244/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454207838&sr=1-1&keywords=american+deep+state" target="_blank">The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on American Democracy</a>-- Peter Dale Scott Scott is too conspiratorial for many--at times to conspiratorial for my own taste. I do wish his topic--the secretive networks of businesspeople, intelligence officers, military, etc which may or may not move forward assasination plots, terrorism, etc but surely do play an important role in shaping policies of such institutions as the Pentagon and CIA--were the subject of more professionalized research. Compared to practically any more traditional topic, it is extraordinarily difficult, hence the lapse into the conspiratorial isn't too surprising. Here he tells a story where, during the fifties and sixties the deep state, like the executive and legislative branches, typically played a centrist role, with Hoover unleashing dirty tricks on violent actors on the right (such as portions of the KKK that wanted a race war in response to the civil rights movement) as well as the left. The aftermath of Watergate spurred the triumph of deep state neocons, who pushed forward a metastatizing deep state that becomes more and more central over the next few decades.<br />
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<br />Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-8210572807540935072015-10-14T12:57:00.000-07:002015-10-14T12:57:46.745-07:00The Longuest Duree: On Kojin Karatani's The Structure of World History<br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reports of the death of grand narratives, ambitious frameworks that seek to sketch out the entire social field, have been greatly exaggerated since the 1980s. The last decade alone has witnessed the publication of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Empire</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Multitude</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Commonwealth</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Making of Global Capitalism</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, and David Graeber’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Debt: The First 5,000 Years</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And now Kojin Karatani has produced </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Duke 2014), which covers more ground than even Graeber’s 5,000 years, and arrives with blurbs from Graeber and Fredric Jameson. Although deeply indebted to Marx and Marxists, Karatani prefers the concept of mode of exchange to mode of production, on the grounds that the latter assumes a determinant base in production on which a less significant superstructure hangs. He instead believes the mode of exchange should focus on the terrain of circulation, what sorts of exchanges are stimulated, and what political and ideological structures facilitate the exchanges. I will leave it to marxologists to quarrel with this formulation. I am more concerned with how much light can be shed by a theoretical perspective. In this case, I would say a good deal.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For Karatani, there are four, or perhaps four and a half modes of exchange. In Mode A, the means of circulation is the gift. It is exemplified by what is called clan society, the first settled forms of human life. Vendettas, in which competing clans repeatedly take revenge on each other, are part of this “gift giving” form of exchange. In this mode, although there is inequality, social classes do not emerge and reproduce themselves. That occurs only in Mode B. Mode B is the state form, in which security is exchanged for goods and loyalty to the state. The law is the signature political achievement of Mode B. Vendettas, a form of “gift” exchange, are ended, replaced with the law of an eye for eye. Mode C is defined by money mediating commodity exchange. Mode D constitutes the utopian return of repressed Mode A to the the more complex class societies of Modes B and C. Since Mode D is a utopian return, it lacks the concreteness of the other modes. The half mode referenced above is the nomadic hunter gatherer mode that precedes Mode A. Karatani notes the extreme difficulties in understanding much about this earliest mode, and that what seem like people who have survived with this form of life may actually be people who have opted out of Modes A or B. For Karatani, the modes generally coexist, although one is likely to be dominant in particular times and places. His exploration of the ways these modes interact and are reinstatiated at a higher level is particularly potent for the modern world, as exemplified by the Capital-Nation-State knot, described below.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The book is loosely organized chronologically, dashing through the emergence of the different modes of exchange before focusing on the modern world in a little more detail. Several themes recur. One is the role of political structures in propelling the transition from one mode of exchange to another. While it is sometimes claimed, in line with notions of an economic base and a political-ideological superstructure, that empires were built atop complex forms of irrigation agriculture, Karatani argues the opposite--that it was the existence of states, endowed with a religious and military apparatus, that were capable of organizing the labor needed for such agriculture. Similarly, the transition to capitalism is usually attributed either to the outcome of class struggles or the growth of trade in cities, while Karatani instead highlights two crucial roles states played. The absolutist states eliminated “feudal” elements that combined political and economic power, including the power of both lords and churches, creating a more even terrain for the functioning of mode C. And far from being a laissez-faire “night-watchmen,” the British state should be seen as playing a crucial role for creating the conditions for the emergence of industrialization, both in its external role in the world and internally in facilitating transformed class relations and a powerful driver of demand. The British state thus resembles so-called “late industrializers” like South Korea, whose use of the state to facilitate the growth of industry is more often highlighted . </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another key theme is the importance of margins, or the “submargins,” Karatani’s term for the more far off portions of empires. The greek city states were at the submargins of world-empires of the ancient world. Western Europe was in the submargin as the Roman Empire collapsed and moved its capital to Byzantium. Although Karatani doesn’t put it this way, this remained the case throughout the modern period. The Dutch Republic, the United Kingdom, the United States and now China were all fairly marginal not long before their precipitous ascents. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The role of religion is also highlighted throughout, particularly the transition from animism, where the spirit is endowed in all sorts of objects during mode A, to the centralization of power and religion in a priestly caste, with the ruler a fusion of king and god, in mode B. In turn, the world religions, which break a pattern of exchange in which worship of a god is premised on receiving favors from that god, are seen as a Mode D bid to restore mode A in the context of mode B: “in the process of empire formation, there is a moment when, under the sway of mode of exchange B, mode of exchange C dismantles mode of exchange A; it is at this moment, and in resistance to it, that universal religion appears, taking the form of mode of exchange D.” Eventually the world religions are captured by empire forces: “what we now call “world religions” rarely extended beyond the former domain of a single world empire.” Even so, the critique remains, in the rhetoric of asserting a “true Christianity” against the failure of the existing church centered order. Later Karatani highlights the utopian heresies of the middle ages, noting they had largely been repressed before Luther led a successful reformation that called for the repression of the peasantry. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He misses one crucial aspect of the world religions. That is their historic role of fostering economic development, combining capital, land, and labor in monastic institutions, as noted by Randall Collins in his underappreciated contribution to the transition to capitalism debate. To put it in Karatani’s framework, they ironically propel societies towards mode C. Such a perspective might highlight the role of Protestants in privatizing church lands, opposing the Catholic order in which saints paralleled the power of the feudal lords, and undermining the corporate structures in the cities, in which guilds were protected from free markets in labor and goods. I was also a little disappointed that he did not historicize Marxism as a secular faith, although he does make the very suggestive comment that it was adopted by the persistent Russian and Chinese empires because its class ideology could help hold together multinational empires otherwise threatened by the rise of nationalism.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Although the work is not a detailed history (how could it be?) striking notions abound. He draws attention to Ionia, rather than Athens, as the birthplace of liberatory philosophy. “(In Ionia) the colonists broke with their clan and tribal traditions, abandoning both the constraints and privileges that these had entailed, to create a new community by covenant. By contrast, Athens, Sparta, and other poleis were established as confederations (by covenant) of existing tribes and were more strongly colored by earlier clan traditions.... If Athenian democracy is the forerunner of todays bourgeois democracy.. Ionian isonomy provides the key to a system that can supersede it.” He sees the innovation of Judaism not in the unification of the twelve tribes under a single god, according to him fairly typical of Mode A transitioning to Mode B, but in the fact that the Jews remained loyal to their god after they had been defeated and found themselves in the “Bablyonian captivity”, paving the way for the claim that theirs was the only legitimate God. When the Mongols under Ghengis Khan not only unified a massive portion of the known world under the direct rule of empire, but also created a viable international framework in the context of reciprocal gift giving, this was the return of the clan approach of Mode A (from which the Mongols emerged) reinstantiated at a higher level. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ultimately the theoretical framework culminates in a description of the modern world, and, here, Karatani’s outline should be productively modified. For Karatani, the key to understanding capitalism is the creation of labor as a commodity. In turn, capitalism is distinct because labor purchases the goods that it produces, in distinction to other modes of exchange. Capitalism emerges in the context of absolutist states, Mode B, that, as they become stronger, seek to eliminate all in-between vestiges between themselves and citizens (the powers of feudal lords, clergy, etc), creating the context for the triumph of Mode C. But as they do, the monarch himself becomes vestigial, and the Nation emerges as a reassertion of the reciprocity of Mode A. And so the “Borromean knot”, a Lacanian term for a set of intertwined rings, of capital-nation-state is constituted as the central political form of the modern world economy. Karatani insists on the reality of each element of the triad. States are not simply an expression of capitalist power. They continue to function in Mode B, exchanging security for citizens for tribute, and engaged in a power struggle with other states that cannot be reduced to capitalist interests. As the reassertion of a horizontal community of Mode A, the nation cannot be dismissed as false consciousness, as Marxists often have. The Borromean knot helps explain why revolutions have changed the world less than hoped. Just because socialist revolutionaries might appropriate the capitalists does not change the fact that the state continues to exist in a larger state system, and indeed, pressure from outside states on the revolutionary state intensifies, distorting its development. Meanwhile, fascism is conceptualized as a struggle of the nation against the state, and Karatani provides intriguing evidence for an affinity between fascist movements and anarchist thinkers. He also highlights the concept, drawn from Marx, of bonapartism. When the state suffers a crisis of legitimacy, and these are not infrequent, a quasi-monarchical figure often emerges to act as the unifier of national interests. This process has most recently been repeated in Egypt. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Influenced by Wallerstein, Karatani identifies a pattern of hegemonic states--the Dutch, the British, and the United States. Each state is associated with the predominance of different commodities--woolens, textiles, durable consumer goods (cars, etc). Karatani says information is next. When hegemonic states are strong, they advocate increased free trade. As they decline, geopolitical competition and protectionism becomes the norm. Notwithstanding all the talk about neoliberalism, Karatani claims we are in a new period of geopolitical competition. However, he offers no real evidence for this assertion, beyond that it fits the pattern he has outlined.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Karatani grounds the philosophical underpinnings of the struggle for a better world in the modern era not in Marx, or even Rousseau, but in Kant. This is likely to be dismaying for Marxists, but is not entirely surprising, as Karatani is a scholar of Kant. Kant’s assertion of the singularity of people cannot be reconciled with the homogenizing impact of the transformation of labor power into a commodity. Karatani writes sympathetically of Marx, but, to some degree, as a stick to poke at Marxists. Although some evidence for locating the revolutionary tradition epitomized by Lenin and Trotsky can be found in Marx, according to Karatani, Marx later repudiated these formulations. He sees Marx as an advocate of producer owned cooperatives rather than a state controlled economy. Karatani emphasizes the limits of the struggles of labor unions and revolutionary governments. Regarding the former, although they are fiercely resisted at first, capitalists, or at least the state managers acting in capitalists’ interests, allegedly come to realize that they are a productive element in guaranteeing that the demand for commodities remain robust. This may be news to American readers, since private sector unionization is now below 10%, yet a substantial portion of the ruling class appears to be devoted to wiping out unions altogether, and, even when the liberal wing of politicians epitomized by Obama is in charge, there is little pushback from the state. The October revolution led by Lenin is depicted as a betrayal of democratic principles, since the Bolsheviks represented a minority within the Soviets. As it failed to become a world revolution, the descent into dictatorship was sealed. Karatani does concede that there was a certain logic to revolutionary state leaders substituting themselves for the nationalist capitalists these states lacked, but this is something altogether different from liberation from capitalism. Karatani asserts the need for world revolution to break the logic of capital-state-nation, and talks a bit about 1848 and 1968, but is vague on specifics. He does see the UN, particularly the aspects of it devoted to fostering discussion of the environment, women’s rights, etc, as a positive development. He recommends consumer boycotts as a key tactic, arguing that consumers, rather than workers, can take a holistic view and act in the general interest, while workers are likely to be limited by the interests of their particular enterprises. So as not to repeat the logic by which revolutionary states get sucked into the interstate competition, he calls for a transformation of the state system into a global federation defined by a gift economy, for example, technology transfers from wealthier states to poorer ones. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Three crucial elements are missing from Karatani’s discussion of the modern world--first, the core/periphery divide, and its ideological justifications, race and orientalism, second, the centrality of modern science to the ideological framework of the world system, and third, a theory of system-wide social change that would include both a broader conceptualization of world revolutions and the role of world hegemonies in consolidating change. I believe adding these to the discussion can produce a richer understanding of where we are and might go. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regarding the first element, the absence of any systematic treatment of the core-periphery divide and in particular its ideological elements, it is a little surprising and dismaying. This is usually a central theme of world historical theorizing of this sort. Karatani seems to make too much of the unequal power generated by seemingly equal exchanges (for example, labor power of a worker for wages from a capitalist) to recognize that these exchanges are not the only form that labor is secured in the modern world. Perhaps the most telling example here is that Atlantic slavery, a sui generis product of the modern world, and increasingly central to histories of American capitalism, is not mentioned in the work.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Up to the present, the model that labor is paid to consume the products it makes does not fit well with peripheral states and peoples. Recall that until the recent crash,US demand was driving the world economy. There simply was not sufficient demand in China, increasingly the “workshop of the world”, let alone in South Asia or Subsaharan Africa, to absorb the goods being produced. This tremendous inequality in spending power should make us sober about the limits of consumer boycott strategies. Some have much more potential to carry these out than others. And those who can have more of a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Even in the present, quite a bit of labor in the periphery hovers around slavery, indentured servitude, and other coercive forms, with immigration enforcement and incarceration often providing a means to limit workers’ rights and force them into unequal exchanges. Furthermore, while the modern world economy has the character of a decentralized system of competitive states, it has also always had a character of being composed of a handful of empires as well. It was only about forty years ago that the last (also practically the first) of the formal modern colonial empires, Portugal, collapsed. Since World War II, the US has played the role of a neo-colonial empire, maintaining a relatively small (albeit real) collection of colonies, but using military force, intelligence agencies, bribery and more to try to do what formal empires have always done--reproduce a subordinate periphery. His claim that core periphery relations are maintained through “equal exchanges” of commodities for money should thus be taken with a large grain of salt. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The ideological justifications of empire, both formal and informal, have been the same. The world population is divided into races, and all are found wanting compared to the white race. Although the history of the modern world has been a history of competing states and empires, race has lent a certain solidarity to the European project. A similar role has been played by Orientalism, in which different cultures, particularly once powerful non-European empires, are compared to Europe and found inferior. As our present world evolves into one characterized by a division between “the planet of slums” and “the gated communities”, both within core and peripheral countries (with the latter simply containing many more slums, as well as still substantial if declining rural populations), these discourses continue to organize governmental and individual interactions, notwithstanding the blurriness of racial and cultural categories in the present. Virtually all the contemporary wars involving major powers amount to the US and whatever allies are at hand attacking some territory on the other side of the race/orientalism/core/periphery divide. Race and orientalism both bisect any constitution of national working classes and expand beyond national borders to envelope the globe. In Karatani’s framework, one should note the way racial and culturally subordinate groups try to revive discourses of Modes A and B to counter their subordination in the context of the dominance of Mode C. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regarding the ideological foundations of the modern world, Karatani overemphasizes nationalism at the expense of everything else.This is particularly unfortunate, because in the premodern context he offers many provocative insights into the evolution and uses of religion. The key point here about the modern world is that the chaos triggered by the religious wars of the sixteenth century opened up space for the emergence of atheism, the permanent demotion of the clergy as a leading force, and the triumph of science and the invigoration and legitimation of science-based status groups, namely professionals. The particular form of science that was legitimized is mechanical, reductionist, quantitative, ahistorical, decontextual. It marginalized both traditional religious perspectives in which a patriarchal god was responsible for the world as it is and other versions of science that are non-reductionist, organic rather than mechanical, complex. Just as the king needed to be beheaded for the modern state as a full fledged, abstract, total institution to emerge, so God, even as a presence, needs to be waved away in favor of a panopticon reducing the world to quantitative phenomena mechanically interacting, what James Scott called “seeing like a state.” The process of eliminating kings and expelling god was slow, uneven and never entirely complete, but it was real nevertheless. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was in the context of the rising prominence of secularism that marxism emerged in ways that parallel the earlier great religions. As with the earlier religions, the context was also defined by the increasing pervasiveness of money, this time in the context of the rise of industrial capitalism. First thinkers appeared, using scientific and secular rhetoric to condemn the ruling order of their time, just as earlier prophets had turned the authority of god against the ruling order of their times. Marxism was first and foremost a faith of intellectuals, much more unevenly penetrating the “proletariat” it idealized as subject. Eventually, it was adopted as the ideology of persistent empires, namely Russia and China, as Karatani notes, as well as certain post-colonial states, in the context of revolutionary wars where the celebration of the proletariat was shelved in favor of an alliance of whatever discontented groups could be found. As Collins might add, the ideology also fueled combinations of land, labor and capital, i.e. “building communism,” “socialism in one country,” “the great leap forward...” These created a larger proletariat and infrastructure, deepening the penetration of Mode C when they were eventually privatized. Marxism became part of, and further accelerated, the dominance of technocratic science, now promising economic growth which would benefit everyone. When the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed, the church structures of Marxism--existing communism, and the Third International, and even related strands of “Marxist-Leninism” largely collapsed with it. However, as with the great religions, the insistence on the prospect of “true Marxism” constituting a critique of Marxism in power allows it to continue as a field of thought and perhaps even reconstruct itself as an ideology. The empires whose revivals were once midwifed by Marxism, Russia and China, are now increasingly confident about shedding Eurocentric ideology, heterogeneously melding modern tactics to older ideological structures (Iran and India are also moving in a similar direction). </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, the technocratic dream continued largely unscathed, although there was now a greater emphasis on attaining the consumer paradise through private enterprises and engagement with the world market. This is the case notwithstanding all the critical forces unleashed from 1968 onward, that have pointed out that the technocratic dream is one dimensional, stifling of cultural diversity, ecologically suicidal, etc. This is, more or less, the ideological impasse we are at. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Karatani is correct that transformation of the nation-state is a dead end given the global status of the state system. He embraces the concept of world revolution, and references, following Wallerstein and others, the events of 1848 and 1968. While it is useful to think in terms of global, rather than national change, these year-long “world revolutions” are only a part of a larger picture. Instead, one should see fairly lengthy periods of political instability as “world revolutions.” Both 1848 and 1968 were of great importance. But they were also a distinct sort of phenomena, a series of interrelated nationally based revolts. In 1848, these revolts were largely confined to Europe, making the “world revolution” phrase particularly misleading. In 1968, they were more genuinely global, crossing through the “three worlds” divide. In both cases, they produced nothing resembling a durable revolutionary seizure of state power anywhere. Both were turning points of sorts, where one sort of left was ending its dominance, and another was emerging. In 1848, it was Republicanism that was producing its last hurrah, while proletarian revolt was just starting to emerge. In 1968, Communism and related national liberation ideologies were exhausting themselves, while leaderless, culturally diverse, ecological and feminist lefts were just starting to emerge. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It would be better to define a longer period for world revolution, perhaps between 1917 and roughly 1979. Arguably there was an earlier one between 1776 and 1848, but the most prominent forces gaining power at that time were the European propertied classes, although there were incipient efforts to create a Mode D renewal of the classless society in the most intense period of the French revolution and the slave revolts of the time. Although most of the revolts that take place in these periods are contained within capital-nation-state spaces, their significance bursts the bounds of the state and resonated throughout the system. It might be more accurate to characterize the world revolt of the twentieth century as “refolution,” combining reform and revolution, since some aspects of it involved reformist projects like the American New Deal or Indian independence, while others were more revolutionary, involving the overthrow of traditional ruling classes in Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, among others. It was as much inspired by geopolitical conflict as by capitalism. For example, mobilizations for world wars tended to lead to increased rights for the working class, who were needed to fight, and the loss of the war destroyed the legitimacy of the Russian ruling class. African Americans were able to throw off Jim Crow first in the context of WWII, when the US agreed to desegregate defense industries to keep domestic peace during war time, and then in the context of the Cold War, when the segregated South had become a huge liability worldwide. The chaos of WWII fatally wounded the colonial empires of France and Great Britain. In a tense and competitive working relationship with the Soviet Union, the US was able to keep chaos in the periphery within the bounds of capital-nation-state. At the same time, a formal international institutional framework (the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc) was consolidated, including military security aspects, finance, but also a number of social features such as UN agencies devoted to health, labor, etc. The US also sought greater global economic integration, but slowly, aware of the strength of working classes and state-led developmental aspirations world wide. In the fifties and sixties, there were notable, if unsuccessful, efforts to break the bonds of the capital-nation-state, such as Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, and the non-aligned movement. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The world refolution left the world in some ways dramatically changed. Formal colonialism was mostly ended, and protections from the deprivations of the market enjoyed greater legitimacy than at any time in the history of the modern world. These gains have to some degree even survived the neoliberal counterrevolution. Furthermore, old empires, including Russia and China, also Iran and India, have been able to regain their footing, and this transformation has probably been permanent, regardless of the fate of the Marxist ideology which midwifed this development but then exhausted itself. At the same time, the capital-nation-state knot survived this entire revolution, as did the core-periphery divide and the technocratic ideology. Changes to the global ruling structure--the liquidation of landed classes, the shift to American power, the loosening of racial boundaries--were reformist rather than revolutionary. Notwithstanding all the international organizations, the principle of state sovereignty remained intact. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As indicated in this brief description of the world refolution of the twentieth century, the accomplishments of world revolutions are consolidated by world hegemons, in this case the United States. Unfortunately, Karatani adapts a fairly conventional view of world hegemons as the most powerful and economically prosperous states of their time. He misreads and dismisses Giovanni Arrighi’s perspective, which is more dynamic, seeing hegemons, in Gramscian terms, as leading new class blocs and perhaps institutions to consolidate their power. Hegemonies build on the strength of emergent classes and their struggles. The US attempted to embody universal demands for development, facilitating the globalization of state system to largely vanquish colonialism, and creating the institutional framework of the UN and related agencies. In this perspective, any future hegemony would build its power on the absorption of demands generated from below, by newer movements.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The context for such movements would be the neoliberal counter-revolution of the last forty years and the declining capacity of the US to maintain its hegemony. Neoliberals seized on the contradictions generated by this system, using debt to try to resubordinate peripheral states, capital flight to undo the power of working classes, and promoting an ideology that suggested everyone must turn themselves into competitive human capital. Even before the financial crash in 2008 which seemed to signal the eclipse of US world power, this situation was producing pushback. The mobilizations between 1999 and 2001 against international institutions--the IMF/World Bank, WTO, etc suggested the prospect of networking together forces around or across the confines of the capital-nation-state. These forces, epitomized by the Zapatistas, often revived Mode A style non-hierarchical exchange internally, even as they networked globally. The consolidation of these forces in the World Social Forum both engaged with the social elements of the UN system and critiqued them. The World Social Forum and similar institutions have been productive sites for the launching of global demands on the most powerful states, such as mobilizations for a debt jubilee, or, more recently, global warming. If the competitive state system is to be transformed into the gift economy Karatani hopes for, it is likely to be in the context of these sorts of mobilizations. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The mobilizations of 2011, perhaps another year-long “world revolution” (the Arab Spring, the Greek and Spanish movements of the squares, the Occupy movement in the US, and more), in dramatic contrast to those of 1999-2001, were all addressed to particular national situations. The main players were members of a middle class in crisis. Deeply integrated into Mode C, they had little memory of Mode A forms of integration outside of the market, and these had to be invented from scratch in the often troubled context of “the general assembly.” Typically defeated in the short term, it is hard not to imagine they will return in new forms over the next few decades, perhaps adopting ideas about producer cooperatives, as did the similar movement in Argentina in 2001. That this movement recurred the next year in Brazil and Turkey, countries not typically imagined as being in crises of either scelrotic authoritarians or economic decline, demonstrated that the struggles tapped a deep and pervasive vein of discontent. Less heralded have been major strike waves in East and South Asia, and signs of the renewal of class struggle in the global north as well. These are likely to be major elements in struggles over the next few decades--demands for global change interacting with the proto-world federation institutions of the United Nations, revival of surviving Mode A and B formations, and the reinvention of Mode A relations by global middle,working, and slum-dwelling classes. Interstate struggle may intensify, but it is not clear that the era of drone warfare and cyber attacks will provide a similar dynamic of creating spaces for popular struggles as the mass armies of the previous period. Whether a new hegemon might emerge to construct an order out of these elements, or whether such an order might emerge without a center (and whether either of these might result in something worth describing as Mode D, the classless Mode A reinstantiated on a global scale), or whether the global order might disintegrate into chaos cannot be determined in advance.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Karatani’s work is immensely valuable for fully thinking through the present. The rigid break between the modern and that which came before, so central to Marxism and most modernist social theory, is blurred. And this is crucial for a moment when it is apparent that many memories of Modes A and B are likely to continue to shape and constrain action. If I find weakness in his evasion of the core-periphery divide of the modern world, his failure to theorize the role of science in the ideology of modernity, and undertheorization of world revolution, it is only to be expected that one work won’t include everything. But there is a lot to build on here.</span></div>
Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-1123713893041244782015-03-15T17:49:00.000-07:002015-03-15T17:49:43.214-07:00Beyond Internationalism<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The world Social Forum, the most important institution of transnational activism to date</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels encouraged workers of the world to unite, internationalism has been a point of pride for the left. Various gestures--the Bolsheviks repudiating World War I, participation in the Spanish Civil War, Soviet Russia and its allies around the world defeating Nazi Germany, solidarity with anti-colonial and/or communist revolutions, boycotts of South Africa and lately Israel--serve as touchstones, reminders that people can act in ways that have consequences for others beyond their national boundaries. Yet most of the time the reference point for acts of solidarity were the politics of particular states. Can we stop this state from going to war? Can we demand a war to stop that state? Can we do something to stop that government from falling? Can we strengthen that insurgency? Can we force that government to change by expanding the suffrage, ending colonialism, etc?<br />
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To this day, this is the main way in which responsibility beyond national boundaries are interpreted. Along with the aforementioned boycott of Israel, intended to force Israel in line with international norms of a non-discriminatory state, one hears of calls for solidarity with activists in Mexico after the murder of 43 students, or solidarity with the new Syriza government of Greece and its struggle against austerity. Important journals like Jacobin and New Left Review encourage a certain cosmopolitanism among their readership, epitomized by reports on the political economy of states around the world. To be on the left is to have familiarity with, or at least curiosity about the politics of states around the world.<br />
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But what of the larger environment in which these states exist? How does one get from solidarity with some movement within a particular state to Marx and Engels original injunction for the workers of the entire world to unite? Not so long ago, there was a popular image of that environment on the left, an image of a powerful core of wealthy states exploiting poorer nations, sometimes through colonial rule, sometimes a little more indirectly, through "neocolonialism." This image valorized anticolonial, sometimes socialist revolutions that attempt to stake out independence or autarky for a state to be better able to mobilize capital and labor and develop.<br />
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This process dead-ended in the eighties, and in the nineties, a new image emerged, globalization. In the left version, although there were still wealthy and poor countries, the emphasis in descriptions of power shifted to international institutions such as the IMF, WTO and the World Bank, all dominated by the US and Western Europe, and multinational corporations, mostly based in the wealthier countries although seemingly operating everywhere. There was a powerful image of capital bursting the bonds of the nation-state and floating all over the world. In the most important formulation, Empire (the world just described, with international institutions, multinational corporations, and capital covering the entire globe, creating a "smooth" space) would be contested by multitude, a singular, non-homogeneous concatenation of people and movements. At the various "global justice" mobilizations between 1999 and 2001, the multitude seemed to be a reality, as anarchists, union members, environmentalists, and other groups all mobilized together and employed nascent internet technology to network themselves, even as they used a diversity of tactics during the protests themselves. The World Social Forum, which began meeting in 2001, institutionalized this practice.<br />
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The movement had perhaps already peaked when the attacks of 9-11 dramatically shifted the subject. Now the focus would be on national governments claiming to protect their populations by any means necessary. But then in 2003, international protests against the imminent invasion of Iraq by the US were hailed as the arrival of "the second superpower," global opinion, by the New York Times. People around the world stood together against the arbitrary projection of military force by the most powerful state in the world. However, global opinion, in this sense, did not become a recurrent a feature of world politics.<br />
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In the next ten years, a new image replaced globalization. This was the image of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), a loose alliance (actually invented by a Goldman Sachs analyst) of rising non-western states. Not especially radical, BRICS, which also can stand for a more general assertiveness of non-western countries that are not included in the acronym, nevertheless collectively posed something like an alternative to the neoliberal order reigned over by the US. BRICS typically opposed military interventions by NATO and the US, and were less dogmatic (more honest?) about state intervention in the economy. South-South economic connections between countries traditionally a part of the colonial world was also a hallmark of BRICS. The neoliberal world claimed to be advancing values of human rights, sustainability, poverty reduction, etc even while mostly getting serious about "structural reforms" that enhanced the power of local and foreign oligarchs and corporations. BRICS, epitomized by China's trade diplomacy, tended to avoid both the rhetoric and the practice in favor of deals between sovereign states to advance their economies. By 2014, BRICS had begun to set up their own institutions, like development banks. Some on the left continued to assert that the bulk of global power remained firmly in the hands of US based institutions, and that geopolitical conflict between BRICS and the US and its allies was overstated. At this writing, it is unclear who is correct.<br />
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Beginning around 2009, shortly after the world economy tanked, a new phase of social struggle emerged. This phase included riots in Greece and accelerated with the Arab Spring and movement of the squares, indignados, and Occupy Wall Street in 2011, This phase often used the hashtag #globalrevolution, suggesting links between all these struggles. While the global justice phase had typically targeted multinational institutions, all the struggles in this phase were basically confrontations within specific nation-states perceived as dominated by oligarchs. The struggling force was very different from the multitude. Rather than a movement of movements, the defining image was of citizens coming together to try to democratically decide how to move forward and struggle through general assemblies. There was a certain amount of movement to movement solidarity, as when Egyptians ordered pizzas for those occupying the state capital in Wisconsin. There is a great deal of awareness among activists that these sorts of rebellions and practices are occurring all over the world. Nevertheless, this is very much a country-by-country wave.<br />
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Now we seem to be entering a new phase, where these movements are to some degree morphing into struggles for state power. The key moment here is the election of Syriza in Greece, with Podemos in Spain waiting in the dock, and similar moments likely in many other countries (I suspect we may even have one in the US in the next decade, if a Democratic outside of the Wall Street network that has retained a stranglehold on the party for the last thirty years were to win the nomination. I know this is hopelessly reformist in the eyes of many of my friends, but if such a candidate were to win the presidency, it would put US politics into unknown terrain). Even Toni Negri, the guru of the nineties anarchists, says it is now time to talk about power. Yet such struggles can no longer plausibly assume a move to the old model of socialism in one country. As it is, Syriza has more modest goals--getting relief from its debt burden, and putting the Greek oligarchs in their place--and it is less than clear that they can achieve such limited goals in the current climate. Syriza must resist the power of the European Central Bank, the IMF, and Germany, but why exactly does this Troika continue to exist? Either Syriza must trigger some kind of generalized rebellion within the EU, leading to a reversal of policies by the Troika, or Greece must exit the Eurozone, a rocky process in the best circumstances, which would likely also leave Greece at the mercy of whoever it could find to offer some assistance--I have heard Russia offered up as one idea.<br />
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There is the obvious question of why states that might try to pursue sober and reasonable policies will quickly find themselves targeted by powerful institutions, and perhaps the target of international sanctions and boycotts. They can perhaps turn towards BRICS, but this grouping ultimately is an agglomeration of state interests, and none of the present day leaders can be said to embody the values of the left. Even if they did, would we want to leave international policies up to ad hoc alliances? This is where, I think it is necessary to rethink the concept of internationalism, and start to conceptualize a genuinely global left.<br />
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Here we should detour a little and note the familiar left critique of prefigurative, local struggles. The image being critiqued is of people who have given up on politics, which involves convincing more people to join your struggles, and instead try to build small scale utopias--community gardens, anarchist bookshops, etc. These efforts are seen by some as basically a distraction from the real work of building institutions of class struggle or electoral politics. I've never agreed with this critique. Many of these small scale institutions are not created as retreats from the world, but as sites to launch struggles, to experiment with new forms of social relations that can hopefully be replicated or scaled up, etc. Even if they don't succeed, they often make their immediate surroundings a little more pleasant, which probably shouldn't be downplayed too much. Mass movements cannot simply be conjured out of thin air as an alternative to small scale experimentation. What I would like to suggest here is that the left should begin to prefigure global society by developing projects that involve border crossing participation. I am not sure what such projects would look like, but I am thinking of something very different from the shared project of targeting one's relevant nation state and then reporting to international comrades about the state of the struggle that still constitutes the horizon of internationalism for the left much of the time. I could imagine research and activist projects, and even non-profit entrepreneurial ventures, all crossing national borders, being launched. Perhaps they already are. This would create a density of experience with acting transnationally that could become the launchpad for the transformation of the larger world environment, either through a march through the existing institutions (IMF, UN, EU, etc) or their subversion and replacement by others, or both.<br />
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One relevant model for what I am thinking of are the UN conferences on topics such as women, racism, poverty etc. There is a left critique of the UN as a tool of the US (a somewhat ahistorical critique, given that the US helped found the UN at the high water mark of left influence within the US, and since then at various intervals even the liberal internationalist wing of the US ruling class has viewed it with deep suspicion), but these conferences are in fact embraced by a broad spectrum of activists, including many on the far left and sometimes boycotted by the US. They provide a forum for activists to talk without necessarily thinking in terms of their national identities. Of course, so does the World Social Forum, also of importance here. For that matter, many conversations on Facebook are prefigurative of global society in this sense. That communicating across borders is now costless is crucial to the current situation. Not long ago, communicating within a nation-state was not particularly expensive, but costs were often prohibitive for communicating across borders except for the most endowed, i.e. the capitalist class. Under such conditions, it was possible to create a relatively cohesive "imagined community" of the nation-state. No longer.<br />
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The nation state is loosing its status as the focus of people's hopes for remaking the world into something better. Everyone intuits the limited capacities of states, even quite large ones. No amount of rhetoric about how states remain important to the neoliberal project will change this.Although I am very sympathetic to such electoral vehicles as the Chavistas in Venezuela and Syriza in Greece, I seriously doubt they will become vessels for launching a thorough remaking of their respective societies along anything remotely resembling the "socialism in one country" that was the defacto project of the twentieth century left. The nation state no longer has the cultural or economic cohesiveness to contain such hopes. In response, many people focus on local efforts where they think they can develop new sorts of social relations or otherwise improve things. The left puts a lot of energy into berating these, implicitly, or even explicitly, hoping people will renew their focus on the state. The left would do better to look for ways to create solidarities beyond the state and across national boundaries. Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-81786796074557749582015-01-24T17:47:00.000-08:002015-01-24T17:47:35.027-08:00Social Movements in 2014: A Report<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-44f27e9e-1ec1-3fa8-9812-fc81f551bbfe" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What follows is a survey of American social movement activity in 2014. It is based on searches through what I posted on facebook throughout the year. The complete list of what I found can be examined </span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U27yHB5v-oBcsq4AXN7GKdR56EeJ2vkwYrXMTcvBmIM/edit" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Although it is not exhaustive and a little heavy on New York City, where I am based, I think it accurately captures the major actions and drift of things. I found six major foci of activity throughout the year--labor, pushback against austerity (somewhat divisible into urban struggles and higher ed), climate change, boycott/divestment and sanctions on Israel, Black Lives Matter, and feminism. Black Lives Matter, better known before October or so as struggles against the New Jim Crow, police violence, and mass incarceration, turned itself into a genuine mass movement which may profoundly reshape the political landscape in the US. But BDS also dramatically grew in its public profile. I suspect activists involved in fighting climate change and challenging rape culture also felt that it was mostly a good year. The fight for fifteen campaign of fast food workers grew, while many other labor campaigns bubbled below the radar. Although barely noted in the mass media, anti-austerity struggles around public schools, water, and higher education also escalated. Below I will review these developments and assess the prospects for these movements to merge, build off each other, and inspire additional struggles.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Quantitatively, labor struggles are only exceeded in my wrap up by the New Jim Crow/Black Lives Matter activity. This may seem surprising in light of the endless, and serious, handwringing about the decline of the labor movement and its inability to change the political and social climate that is suffocating it. Perhaps it is just a bias on my part. But it is also the case that unions remain large organizations capable of launching and supporting highly consequential struggles--there aren’t too many things more important to most people than how much they are paid and the conditions they work under. Notwithstanding the sad UAW defeat at a Tennessee plant where Volkswagen had made clear it wouldn’t oppose the union, there are real signs of a fight back culture both within unions and within parts of the working class. Even at that Volkswagen plant, the UAW went on to form a minority union, rather than slink away as it probably would have ten years ago. But there were more significant signs of what I am talking about. Most notably, there is the Fight for Fifteen campaign of fast food workers. Since it was initiated in 2012, the campaign has remained maddeningly slow building--no reports of marches spontaneously swelling as low wage workers simply jump onboard. Instead, it has grown one participant at a time, marked by carefully planned, media friendly protest (“strike”) days. And yet it has influenced American society as no labor campaign in recent history, fueling numerous struggles for higher minimum wages throughout the country. It has also continued to evolve, this year reaching out to other low wage workers such as home care workers, and engaging in civil disobedience. The Fight for Fifteen campaign also seemed to inspire Walmart workers to step up their game, after being on the defensive against retaliations by their employers for the last couple of years. In May, “Walmart Moms” staged a walkout. In November, workers staged civil disobedience protests and also engaged in a sit-down strke at a store in California. Drivers and longshoremen at the ports on the West Coast, truly a strategically located work force, given the heavy dependence of the US economy on imports, engaged in a protracted struggle for recognition which ended in victory in January, although contract issues remain unresolved. Airport workers at low wage concessions staged protests in New York and Minneapolis. Teachers elected foes of corporate education reform to head their unions in a number of large cities. Efforts of low paid adjuncts to unionize around the country picked up steam. SEIU won $15/hour for teaching assistants in Los Angeles schools. The “sharing” economy was also the site of struggles, as Uber drivers struck and Lyft drivers burned the pink mustaches that adorn their cars. Meanwhile, Facebook shuttle bus drivers joined the teamsters. This brief summary gives a sense of the terrain of US labor struggles--low paid service work, transportation (in many variants), and education are among the key foci. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As labor has shown more interest lately in connecting with other struggles, it blends a little into our next category, pushback against privatization and deterioration of public services. Here we would put Moral Mondays, initiated in 2013 in North Carolina, but spreading throughout the South and even further afield in 2014. Moral Mondays is rooted in the NAACP and builds alliances of labor and community groups and progressive activists to push back against right wing agendas at state houses. One major demand in 2014 was for states that have avoided doing so to fund the expansion of medicaid under Obamacare. Public education was another site of some of the most urgent struggles in this category. In Brooklyn, teachers at one school refused to administer standardized tests. In Newark, students repeatedly protested against the “One Newark” school reform plan. In Chicago, students protested school closures. In Compton, teachers held a sick out. In Philadelphia, thousands protested when the School Reform Commission unilaterally cancelled teachers’ contracts. In Detroit, city efforts to cut the water service of individuals said to be delinquent (but not major corporations, who were allowed to be laggards about paying their bills) were confronted by protests, leading to a reprieve, which, last I heard, was no longer in effect. The Ferguson protests crossed over with this category. Moral Mondays made an appearance during Ferguson October. In December, Philly students staged a die in to protest a student who died as a result of a lack of a nurse at school. In Baltimore, protesters shut down a meeting of the school board, declaring “Black lives matter.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Some movements at universities should be noted in this context as well. At the University of Southern Maine, an administrative effort to savage a bunch of departments with faculty layoffs led to a student occupation of university buildings, and an eventual reversal. In November, The University of California was also the site of resurgent struggle--perhaps the most intense since 2009--against an effort to raise tuition via student fees. Do struggles against commencement speakers like Condeleeza Rice, Christine Lagarde, and Bill Maher fit into this category? Such speakers are chosen by administrators to bring the image of the campus in line with dominant neoliberal and neoconservative trends.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Renascent feminism turned its attention towards violence against women in 2014, although I also picked up a report on networks of activists connecting women who live in the expanding areas of the US where it is impossible to get an abortion with providers. In May, dominant narratives of the UCSB shooter Elliot Rodgers as being all about mental illness or gun control were disrupted by social media demands that his misogny, indistinguishable from that of online subcultures like “Mens Rights Activists” be understood as the context for his rampage. Later in the year, considerable attention was focused on the issue of rape on college campuses. The state of California adopted “affirmative consent” as the standard at the state’s colleges and universities. Perhaps the most visible protest of rape was that initiated by rape victim Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University, who carried her mattress around campus as a symbol of the burden of violence. In turn this led to “collective carries” of the mattress by those who shared the sentiment, and this gesture was replicated around the US and even further afield. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Climate change activism was divided into roughly two phases. During the first half of the year, activists protested the Keystone XL pipeline, including civil disobedience at the White House and a “Cowboy-Indian alliance” of ranchers and Native Americans. Additionally, the movement to boycott fossil fuels picked up energy, with the Unitarian Church voting to divest. The second phase was defined by the People’s Climate March in September. Criticized widely on the far left for its failure to raise specific demands, the march did incubate, in the context of a conjoined conference, the People’s Climate Summit, climate justice activism rooted in working class communities. Although not really mobilizing 300,000 participants as some overenthusiastic voices claimed, the march itself was huge, and, along with the aforementioned climate justice groups, also featured the participation of labor unions, who have not always been quick to join environmental coalitions. The Monday following the march, activists “flooded Wall Street,” reviving direct action tactics that had been largely absent from New York City since the demise of Occupy Wall Street. Following the March, climate activism was relatively low profile, although a lively struggle in upstate New York against a proposed Seneca Lake gas storage facility should be counted. Anti-fracking activists in New York state chalked up a victory as Andrew Cuomo banned fracking.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Movements challenging Israeli policies and US support for those policies, most notably the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, also raised their profile in 2014. This is a movement with a particularly tough road, given the lack of anything resembling liberal allies in electoral politics or the mainstream media. Such movements have few options but to try to raise the status of their issue to a public controversy, which is what this movement has begun to do. In fact, 2013 was a fairly successful year in this regard, and much of the activism at the beginning of the year involved fending off repression of the movement responding to this success. In February, an anti-BDS bill that would have seriously impinged on academic freedom was fended off in New York state. In April, Northeastern University was forced to end its suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. But the real turning point came with the Israeli assault on Gaza. Even as much of the mainstream media seemed more constricted than ever, movement activity escalated. Most notably, the group Jewish Voices for Peace rapidly expanded, and protests erupted within the Jewish community. For example, protesters were arrested at the Philadelphia Jewish Federation. This culminated in October with the Open Hillel conference, which challenged the major Jewish campus organization, notoriously for shutting out debate about Israel, but facing growing dissension from within. Another very notable aspect of activism was the blockading of ships seeking to unload goods from Israel in Oakland and Florida. But perhaps the most dramatic surge was related to the revoking of a job for Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Although people have been punished within academia before for speaking out about Israel, the Salaita case generated an unprecedented level of pushback. While he has not been rehired, he is now a prominent national figure for the movement and UIUC’s reputation has taken a hit. The case continues to reverberate throughout academia and has fueled more talk about participating in BDS. We should not conclude this section without noting that the two most prominent standard bearers for progressive electoral politics, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have both been targeted for protests, given their uncritical support for Israel, and both took small steps away from the most reactionary positions in response. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course, the biggest break-out movement of 2014 was the series of protests against police killings, and, more generally, the criminalization of African Americans and others, now known as Black Lives Matter. This movement has escalated so dramatically since the protests following the killing of Mike Brown in August that it can be forgotten that it has actually been building for some time--recall the national protests after Trayvon Martin was killed and then after George Zimmerman was acquitted, in 2012. In January, there were protests following the not guilty verdict for the officers involved in killing White mentally ill man, Kelly Thomas in California. In April, incarcerated workers in Alabama struck. Also in April, #mynypd, a hashtag encouraged by the NYPD, backfired as people used it to link to videos of police violence and tell their stories. In May there were protests against a killing in Albuquerque as well as in East Salinas. In July, rallies were held immediately following the killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island. Cecilly McMillan, an Occupy activist sentenced to three months in jail on a preposterous charge of assaulting an officer, spoke out about conditions at Rikers. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But it was in August, when protests exploded in Ferguson in response to the killing of Mike Brown, that the movement decisively expanded. Several developments were notable--the emergence of a young generation of activists, including many women in leadership roles, uninterested in being led by more established figures such as Al Shaprton. A second was the high visibility of the militarized police response, which failed to quell the protests. A third was links made by protesters to the struggle in Gaza. Because of the intensity of the protests, they generated national attention and sympathetic protests as the movements around Kelly Thomas, Eric Garner, and others had not. New Orleans residents took over a police station in solidarity with Ferguson. Howard students staged a memorable photo of hundreds doing the “hands up” pose. Ferguson seemed to generate increased attention and protest to other forms of police abuse as well. For example, in the wealthy, mostly white neighborhood of Park Slope Brooklyn, there was an outcry over police using speakers on their cars to shoo African American youth out of the neighborhood. In Ohio, protests in response to the police shooting of John Crawford also escalated along with police violence in response. Activists held “Ferguson October,” encouraging people from around the country to converge on Ferguson to protest and strategize. Connections were forged with Moral Mondays, and new targets of protest like Emerson Electric and Walmart were identified, even as a new killing by the police in St Louis fueled more protests. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">When grand juries failed to indict Darren Wilson for killing Mike Brown, in late November, and Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner, in early December, the movement intensified to another level. Suddenly Eric Garner was a national figure, rather than a New York City story. It was around this time that activists started shutting down highways around the country, too numerous to mention. As this corresponded with the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, there were protests at the Thanksgiving Parade and also at numerous shopping malls. The Bay Area was the site of multiple actions, including shutting down a Bart Line, shutting down the Oakland Police Department, and an intense wave of protests some described as insurrectionary. Large marches were held in NYC and DC on December 13. At the DC march, held under the auspices of Al Sharpton’s organization, young activists rushed the stage in frustration at their voices being marginalized by the more established leadership. Prominent athletes also wore t-shirts and/or delivered the “hands up” gesture, sometimes earning the ire of various administrators. It should also be noted that the wave of protests in December included New York City council members, congressional staffers in DC, and public defenders in NYC. In other words, as well as a vibrant, confrontational mass engaging in street protests, the movement has supporters within the system. Those supporters were thrown on the defensive when, on December 20, Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore, drove up to New York City, and killed two police officers. Under fire from the police union head, mayor Bill de Blasio called for a halt in the protests until after the officers’ funerals and was echoed by other liberal politicians. Protesters ignored this call, and continued as they had. For their part, the police used the funerals of their colleagues as an occasion to protest the mayor, and initiated a work stoppage that had the effect of increasing debate as to whether “broken windows” policing, with its punitive approach to minor offenses when committed by poor, non-white people, is actually necessary, since halting it did not result in a major crime increase. Cracks, which likely have some resemblance to racial divides, have also widened within the police force, with reports of a shoving match between supporters of union leader Lynch and his opponents at one meeting. Elsewhere in the country, the shooting of the officers didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the movement. But street protests at the fever pitch of December never last forever, and the movement will undoubtedly evolve in 2015. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In a widely circulated column, Mark Bittman raised the possibility of movements flowing together and strengthening each other, quoting Reverend William Barber of Moral Mondays to that effect. Bittman emphasizes the way all the struggles of low wage workers have begun to converge and have increased pressure nationwide to raise the minimum wage. He also noted that these movements had converged a bit with Black Lives Matter, perhaps not surprising, since the categories of low wage worker and the overpoliced overlap a lot. Although he doesn’t mention it, energy from Black Lives Matter has also been spilling over into education and related anti-austerity struggles, such as the disruption of the Baltimore board of education meeting noted above. Other struggles are harder to imagine simply merging. For example, most climate activism around Keystone and fossil fuel divestment appears based among the college educated activist strata, although some indigenous groups are also involved. Struggles around Israel are largely conducted by a mix of this “traditional” activist strata and students of Middle Eastern descent. The labor unions have been organizing the campaigns of low wage workers, but the still substantial portion of the American workforce presently in labor unions is mostly not low wage. Campus struggles around rape may also seem remote. The divide between a largely white activist strata that typically cuts its teeth on campus activism and a increasingly active, largely African American, urban-based population echoes class and racial divides in the larger society. But things aren’t all that cut and dry. Blacklivesmatter has mobilized diverse groups, reaching deep into many campuses (especially, but by no means only, historically black ones), and cutting across racial lines within cities. Based on photographs, it appears that the Walmart struggle has mobilized more whites than non-whites nationwide--”low wage workers” is actually a very racially diverse group of people. As noted above, the People’s Climate March involved coalition building with labor unions and environmental justice groups, both aimed at demographics outside the largely white activist subculture. Ferguson activists recently visited Palestine to affirm their solidarity. Although many of the higher ed institutions besieged by budget cuts and fee hikes are largely white, the basic logic of what is happening is not much different from attacks on public education in the cities. Adjuncts are simultaneously white college educated (and not infrequently teaching in disciplines that are relatively left) and low wage workers; increasingly, they are union members as well, which may have implications for the larger labor movement. The organized labor force may not be low wage, but they are obviously under siege and would be well advised to pay attention to disruptive and media friendly tactics others are using if they do not wish to be low wage soon. In other words, there are grounds for connecting and unifying struggles, if people are willing to pay attention to what others are doing and struggling about, and think through ways that everything is connected. </span></div>
Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-48099595111466258642014-10-05T18:56:00.000-07:002014-10-05T18:56:20.866-07:00My own national book awards<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbjWyZhVxBW_F7huxWmcbcrfZ-mWRXGwdGGSvcPybEUCR1bYRSCO3ut2r3Y9DLCDdM26XVK7Z6l112-7l_VnHHnZNExJr-SQ-TVik81guF1llsBtfbIhDVsXN6MnCNlFRzbyOsCM1yZuKX/s1600/picketty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbjWyZhVxBW_F7huxWmcbcrfZ-mWRXGwdGGSvcPybEUCR1bYRSCO3ut2r3Y9DLCDdM26XVK7Z6l112-7l_VnHHnZNExJr-SQ-TVik81guF1llsBtfbIhDVsXN6MnCNlFRzbyOsCM1yZuKX/s1600/picketty.jpg" /></a></div>
The <a href="http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2014.html#.VDH1i1ccWSo" target="_blank">long list</a> of National Book Award nominees for nonfiction for 2014 was released on September 17. It came to my attention when a friend on Facebook pointed out the limited diversity of the list--just one woman, and no people of color (more accurately, one, Anand Gopal). But the lack of diversity is just one of the list's problems. If the major goal of non-fiction is to provide insight into important questions facing the larger society--certainly I think this is the goal--the list is almost a complete failure. Excluding Gopal's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/No-Good-Men-Among-Living-ebook/dp/B00GVRVAXM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412178248&sr=8-1&keywords=anand+gopal" target="_blank">book</a>, which sheds light on how Afghanis have experienced the American occupation of Afghanistan, I can't see how any of the books on the list (I admit I haven't read them) could qualify. Some of the list reads like a parody of current publishing cliches. There is neo-gilded age kitsch called "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-Revolution-ebook/dp/B00JGAS65Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178314&sr=1-1&keywords=innovators+isaacson" target="_blank">The Innovators</a>." There is presidential hagiography, the main form of popular history in the US. Apparently we are moving on from Lincoln to FDR. If you pay any attention to these things, you will not be surprised that the words "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mantle-Command-FDR-War-1941-1942-ebook/dp/B00E78ICVA/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178422&sr=1-6&keywords=roosevelt+at+war" target="_blank">at war</a>" follow the president's name in the title. Another author has written <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cant-Talk-about-Something-Pleasant-ebook/dp/B00JA9JE0Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178495&sr=1-1&keywords=something+more+pleasant" target="_blank">a memoir </a>apparently focused on her dysfunctional parents, not at all an overcrowded genre, and hailed as a breakthrough because it is in cartoon form ("the first cartoonist honored by the National Book Awards in the adult categories"). I would add, only a couple of decades after "Maus." A <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth-ebook/dp/B00GET185M/ref=sr_1_1_ha?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178712&sr=1-1&keywords=age+of+ambition" target="_blank">journalist travels around China in another title</a>--I'm guessing he meets ambitious people who aren't too worried about the government, discovers there is a lot of corruption and pollution, and that inequality is growing. Three titles form a mini-treatise on the religious views of the nominating committee. "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Natures-God-Heretical-American-Republic-ebook/dp/B00FQUDU60/ref=sr_1_1_ha?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178546&sr=1-1&keywords=nature%27s+god+the+heretical+origins+of+the+american+republic" target="_blank">Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic</a>" sounds like pushback against Tea Party nonsense that postulates the founding fathers as fundamentalist Christians. But then "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heathen-School-Story-Betrayal-Republic-ebook/dp/B00FDS79B2/ref=sr_1_1_ha?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178587&sr=1-1&keywords=the+heathen+school" target="_blank">The Heathen School: A story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic</a>" sounds somewhat sympathetic to Christian efforts to educate a multicultural cast of "heathens", demonstrating that the nominating committee is not rigidly anti-religion. And then E.O. Wilson's "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Human-Existence-Edward-Wilson/dp/0871401002/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178628&sr=1-1&keywords=meaning+of+human+existence" target="_blank">The Meaning of Human Existence</a>" offers a scientist's reflections on deep philosophical questions, showing that these sorts of meditations are not the monopoly of the religious. Rounding out the list are titles on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tennessee-Williams-Mad-Pilgrimage-Flesh-ebook/dp/B00KSHZT1U/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178838&sr=1-1&keywords=tennessee+williams+mad+pilgrimage+of+the+flesh" target="_blank">Tennessee Williams</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/When-Paris-Went-Dark-Occupation-ebook/dp/B00H25FCHC/ref=sr_1_1_ha?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412178762&sr=1-1&keywords=when+paris+went+dark" target="_blank">Paris under the German occupation</a> seemingly plucked at random from a list of respectable sounding books published this year. What a dismal, unexceptional list. Excluding Gopal, efforts to engage with the major problems of our time are practically absent, unless you want to believe the culture war between the religious and secular still constitutes the major dynamic.And the sad thing is this has been a great year for non-fiction works. I therefore offer the following list of books that should have been honored. It is not especially counterintuitive. A number of these books have gotten a fair share of attention. Two hit the bestseller list. This only raises more questions about the official list.(disclaimer--I haven't read all of the books below. I don't claim to agree with everything any of these authors say)<br />
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1. Thomas Picketty, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X" target="_blank">Capital in the 21st Century</a> I wasn't able to find rules on the National Book Award's website. I certainly hope, for their sake, that the rules forbid authors based outside the US. How else to explain the absence of the unchallengeable non-fiction book of the year? Simultaneously a serious economic history, an endorsement of a populist prognosis that the rich seem to be getting almost continuously richer at the expense of everyone else, and a bestseller, Picketty played a key role in returning inequality to public debate, after it had receded with the demise of Occupy.<br />
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2. Gerald Horne, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Counter-Revolution-1776-Resistance-Origins/dp/1479893404/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1411780520&sr=1-1" target="_blank">The Counter Revolution of 1776</a> Horne's depiction of the American colonialists as simultaneously obsessed with expanding slave society and terrified of the prospect of slave revolt is not easily shaken. His narrative culminates with a fresh approach to the American revolution, as a rebellion against the prospect of abolition.<br />
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3. Rick Perlstein, <span class="text_exposed_show"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Bridge-Fall-Nixon-Reagan-ebook/dp/B00HXGD5CE/ref=sr_1_1_ha?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411780583&sr=1-1&keywords=invisible+bridge" target="_blank">The Invisible Bridge</a> Perlstein's history of the US in the seventies generated unfounded charges of plagiarism. His real crime--chipping away at the halo around Ronald Reagan, the signal historiographical achievement of the right wing in the last thirty years.</span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show"> 4. Naomi Klein, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/This-Changes-Everything-Capitalism-Climate/dp/1451697384/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1411780610&sr=1-1" target="_blank">This Changes Everything</a> A very timely intervention putting both questions about the role of the state and the question of capitalism on the climate change agenda. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> 5. Simon Head,<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mindless-Smarter-Machines-Making-Dumber/dp/0465018440/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_har?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411780654&sr=1-1&keywords=mindless+simon+head" target="_blank"> Mindless:Why Smarter Machines are Making Humans Dumber</a> Largely neglected, perhaps because of its unfortunate subtitle. A serious examination of the transformation of the labor process by computer business systems, that also highlights how these systems migrated out from the military. A worthy successor to Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capitalism."</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> 6. Greg Grandin, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Necessity-Slavery-Freedom-Deception-ebook/dp/B00EGJ7KX6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411780752&sr=1-1&keywords=greg+grandin+the+empire+of+necessity" target="_blank">The Empire of Necessity </a>A true story of slave rebellion that inspired fiction by Herman Melville provides a window into the relationship between slavery and capitalism.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> 7. Edward E. Baptist,<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told-ebook/dp/B00JZBA9K6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411780785&sr=1-1&keywords=the+half+has+never+been+told+slavery+and+the+making+of+american+capitalism" target="_blank"> The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism </a> Now famous as a book<i> The Economist</i> declared was too hard on slaveholding whites, this also illuminates the relationship of slavery and capitalism. A big topic getting very belated attention is worth two nods on the list.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> 8. Douglas R. Egerton, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Wars-Reconstruction-Americas-Progressive/dp/160819566X" target="_blank">The Wars of Reconstruction</a> That the Civil War presaged the total war of the twentieth century is a cliche; this book left me convinced that we should think of the wave of reactionary violence after the Civil War, ultimately successful in defeating the push for African American rights, as a precursor to the twentieth century reactionary terror in Spain, Indonesia, Chile, etc.</span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">9. Dana Goldstein, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Teacher-Wars-Americas-Embattled-Profession-ebook/dp/B00IWTSK7Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411780900&sr=1-1&keywords=teacher+wars" target="_blank">The Teacher Wars</a> Provides actual historical background that can be used to put the current attacks on teachers' unions and public schools in context.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">10. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Peoples-History-Revisioning-American/dp/080700040X/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1411780943&sr=1-1" target="_blank">An Indigenous People's History of the United States</a> Rather overdue telling of American history from the perspective of its victims. Hopefully this just released book will reopen a question that the American left has quietly abandoned.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516183528649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">11. Alice Goffman, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/On-Run-Fieldwork-Encounters-Discoveries/dp/022613671X/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1411781009&sr=1-1" target="_blank">On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City</a> </span></span></span>Among other things, this ethnographer witnessed the police kill a man and falsify a report about it. Her subject--the relationship of young African American men to the justice system that torments rather than serves them--is crucial.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".s.1:3:1:$comment10152516162238649_10152516177228649:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$end:0:$0:0">I could go on. There are many books being produced that develop insights into key historical and social questions of our time. These are books whose goal is not to score a few academic points, but to foster debate among a much broader public. Some of them have actually succeeded in doing so. I don't really understand the case for honoring the non-fiction on the long list of the National Book Awards as opposed to my list. Perhaps they have some other criteria. Maybe they have a more aestheticized understanding of non-fiction, in which what matters is the artfulness of the prose and the narrative structure. This sounds like a terrible idea to me. But even so, such a list probably wouldn't include celebrations of dot com entrepreneurs and presidents. Those books are not the next "In Cold Blood." Rather, the list seems to be saying "don't raise important questions. Keep producing grist for the NPR mill. We will honor you anyway." </span></span></span> </span>Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-27336831734713930682014-09-05T08:01:00.001-07:002014-09-05T18:01:08.249-07:00Gaza to Ferguson<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHclID6n21DHHBcvO6wCshYCz4srWw-Le0In_jB5TWV6Kjf6QlyGt0qVPP0xwa0S03WHiPd4pngVLjz9Wm64fcEwXHCDGturq0EVBqvDjcdBGyUq1TiSMhsvEJ5M5iIJnWcKmjAwTtKcv4/s1600/fergusongaza.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHclID6n21DHHBcvO6wCshYCz4srWw-Le0In_jB5TWV6Kjf6QlyGt0qVPP0xwa0S03WHiPd4pngVLjz9Wm64fcEwXHCDGturq0EVBqvDjcdBGyUq1TiSMhsvEJ5M5iIJnWcKmjAwTtKcv4/s1600/fergusongaza.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the most heartening developments connected to the uprising in Ferguson has been connections made with the resistance in Gaza--connection made by people in Ferguson, in Gaza, and around the world. This connection reignites the internationalism of 2011--"Arab Spring, European Summer, American Fall" but at a different level. Whereas the rebellion of the squares in 2011 was based on growing alarm among the highly educated that they no longer had a decent future (notwithstanding the huge differences between the political context in the Arab countries and the West), Ferguson/Gaza represents the revolt of those who have always been aware that they have no future.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The connection between Ferguson and Gaza has been made partly because of concrete manifestations, most notably the training of the police chief in Ferguson in Israel. Here I will describe three ways in which the two situations paralleled each other. First is the basic context. These are revolts of people who have basically been declared redundant, in the way of the prosperous people who believe they have every right to whatever they want. They are not first and foremost a proletariat in the marxist sense--unemployment is too high to use strikes as a primary weapon, nor do those who are employed occupy a particularly strategic place in production. This does not mean that they are not exploited--Ferguson is what it is partly because of the looting of the subprime era, and the conflict over Gaza is in part a conflict over control of resources. As well in Ferguson, part of the larger picture of policing is an effort by the city government to use motor vehicle fines to fund itself--in effect squeezing an impoverished population because more conventional revenue sources--taxes from property or business--are less and less viable. They are shunted to the margins, where the powerful hope they will remain quiescent. In return, they are offered virtually nothing. Whether one calls the places they are forced into occupied territories, slums, ghettos, refugee camps or prisons, at this point, there is little effort to dress them up in the bunting of consumerism or progress. Instead, the powerful basically believe they cannot make trouble, so there is hardly reason for the sort of elaborate work (and often dollars) needed to maintain hegemony. This situation, to be regarded as human trash, exploited sometimes, but often just pushed aside, is the first parallel between Gaza and Ferguson. And this helps clarify what just happened. In both places, this situation has been resisted. The invisible made themselves visible. And their foes were not able to put them back in their place.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This brings us to the second major parallel between Gaza and Ferguson. Basically, both Israel and the forces of order in Ferguson lost their respective battles. Israel visited horrific destruction on Gaza. Over 2,000 people were killed, thousands more maimed, tens of thousands left homeless. The economic infrastructure was destroyed. A high tech progrom was carried out, involving terrifying robo-calls to imminent victims of drones, and hateful messages scrawled on the walls of destroyed homes. But Hamas’ capacity to fire projectiles seems intact. The tunnels seem more menacing than they were perceived at the beginning of the conflict. Dozens of Israeli soldiers were killed, a small fraction of the Palestinian death toll, but too many for the Israeli public. And the effects on consciousness further afield--within Israel, in the West Bank, in the United States, and in the rest of the world--are largely opposite what the Israeli leadership hoped for, unless it has completely lost its mind (More about this below). </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Ferguson, it was the appearance of militarized police that catapulted this story onto the front pages. But it was also striking that the heavy handed show of overwhelming force failed to repress the protests. The contrast with Occupy Wall Street was stark. Occupy gained its footing because of political fumbles that resulted in a failure to promptly confront it. By the time Bloomberg was ready to go ahead with a “park cleaning,” OWS had already gathered sufficient steam and liberal allies to force him to call it off. But when a militaristic police force showed up in the middle of the night, the park was easily cleared. It was a devastating blow from which the movement did not recover. More than a few OWS sympathizers concluded that consequential protest in the US would be met with overwhelming force and quashed. In Ferguson, not only did the militarized police fail to stop the protests. The arrival of the “good cop,” Ronald Johnson, also did not seem to slow the momentum. Nor did the mobilization of the National Guard. At this point the protests appear to be declining, not so much because they have been repressed but because these sorts of mobilizations don’t last forever. There are some promises from the Attorney General and the FBI to look into the killing of Michael Brown. I suspect many people in the immediate area and quite far afield are concluding that this sort of protest is effective and possible. And, as with Gaza, we must consider the opinions of actors further afield. Here too, the protestors won big.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lets look first at the larger battle for hearts and minds around the Isreal/Palestine conflict. Israel itself has been sliding towards a vicious, intolerant, racist madness depicted by Max Blumenthal in his book </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Israel’s foundation is racist, but the polity has long had quite a bit of space for dissenters and, not so long ago, there was a substantial, even if lightweight, peace movement. During the first weeks of the assault on Gaza, demonstrations were small, didn’t have many Jewish participants, and were met by terrifying mobs out for blood. By the end, there was a modest revival of the old peace movement, and larger demonstrations. Israel has a ways to go before getting back to the inadequate normal of the nineties, but these cracks haven’t appeared for a while. Still, it is hard to be too optimistic about developments within Israel. But then there is the situation in the West Bank. Lately the West Bank has epitomized acquiescence to the status quo, as Gaza has epitomized resistance. Abbas has followed a cautious strategy (if that is the right word for it), trying not to offend the US or Europe much. And this strategy has not been effectively challenged from below. But a couple of weeks after the onslaught on Gaza began, the largest demonstrations in years were held in the West Bank. Now we read that </span><a href="http://972mag.com/the-west-bank-may-be-on-the-verge-of-exploding/95673/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the West Bank may be on the verge of a social explosion.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Further afield, in places like London and South Africa, some of the largest demonstrations ever in solidarity with Palestine were held. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then there is the situation in the United States. Notwithstanding the unanimity of the Senate in affirming its support for Israel, notwithstanding all the ridiculous lies and twisted arguments promoted in the media, the space for dissent around US support for Israel, already increasing in the last ten years, widened substantially. Two developments were particularly noteworthy. One was the direct action to “<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/demonstrators-temporarily-blocking.html" target="_blank">block the boat</a>,” and prevent a ship carrying Israeli goods from unloading in the Bay Area. It represented a heightened level of confrontation and confidence for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The other was action taken by Jewish Voices for Peace to <a href="http://jewishexponent.com/headlines/2014/08/protesters-escorted-from-philly-jewish-federation-in-handcuffs" target="_blank">protest at Jewish Federation offices in several cities</a>. This literally marks the arrival of activism and controversy about support for Israel within the formal organizations of American Jewry. This is a very significant development. The unanimous support for Israel by these organizations has been a huge obstacle to change in the US. The left extreme of American rabbis (apart from an eccentric Hassidic group) has typically been to use wiggle words, wring hands, and say “we hope there can be peace.” The emergence of J Street, a pro-Israel group which took a little distance from the traditional Israel Lobby, AIPAC, was a welcome development, but it was too limited in its dissent to make much of a difference. In theory, a coalition to end military aid to Israel and transform the US relation to it could be built around the Jewish community; in practice, liberal groups (labor unions, African American leaders, liberal churches, etc) have been fearful of undermining their relationship with Jews. The sooner the unanimity is broken, then, the better. Two signs of the time--an article in an Israeli newspaper warns that “Israeli Apartheid Week” held on many college campuses the last few years is likely to turn into “Israeli Apartheid Year” this coming school year, as BDS activism picks up. And the New York Times j<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/sunday/israels-move-to-the-right-challenges-diaspora-jews.html" target="_blank">ust published an anti-zionist Op Ed piece </a>that could appear on Electronic Intifada or MondoWeiss. For those familiar with the perspective of those three publications, and notwithstanding the Times editorial page’s formal commitment to offering diverse perspectives that its editors do not endorse, this is a “hell freezes over” moment. At the very least real wariness about the motives and actions of Israel is becoming dominant among liberal public opinion, and I think organizations are likely to become more confident about expressing some need for US policy to change. Progressive politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Bill de Blasio, who have back-burnered this issue when not expressing outright support for Israel, are likely to find themselves under fire. Few in the US will say this out loud, but the increasing space for criticism of Israel can be traced back to the resistance posed by Hamas. If not for that resistance, and Israel’s monstrous and ineffectual response, Palestine would remain mired at too low a spot on the progressive radar to fight the steep obstacles facing those who want change.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Ferguson is triggering similar changes in public opinion and the space for activism. The image of the criminal or radical African American male has been a weapon in the reactionary arsenal for decades (actually centuries). I well remember the reaction to the looting during the New York blackout of 1977 (in retrospect, an indirect response to the austerity imposed in response to the fiscal crisis of the early 70s) occuring in the midst of a decade when the "Black mugger" was very prominent in the popular imagination. “Those people are on welfare, but it is still not enough for them, and they defy the logic of a civilized society by looting." Soon the US elected a president endorsed by the KKK, as well as his successor, whose defining campaign ad was also the vilification of the African American male as criminal, in this case Willie Horton. The momentum of this stereotype was devastating to the African American community, which was incarcerated at ruinous rates. It was also destructive to any hopes for a broad coalition to challenge the power and concentrated wealth of what Occupy memorably tagged “the 1%.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For its part, as it revived class-based populism, Occupy basically evaded race. In fairness, Occupy showed solidarity with Troy Davis and others like him. But it can’t be said that it attempted to take on the question of police persecution of communities of color very directly, except somewhat at the end as it was looking for allies to challenge police repression. The power of the stereotype of the black criminal was not simply in its ability to mobilize those on the right; it also coursed through liberal circles, where, again going back to the seventies, resentment among White liberals that Blacks did not appreciate White liberal leadership or were impinging on White public patronage networks was rife. And, not least, it helped paralyze African American politics. I remember once hearing Bill Fletcher on Democracy Now!, discussing the aftermath of the acquittal of police officers who had killed Sean Bell. The New York Times had noted (a little giddily, I thought), that there were no riots or unruly demonstrations. Fletcher said that to understand the muted response, one had to understand the fear of crime within the Black community.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clearly, something has changed. If we look at the chain of Troy Davis-Trayvon Martin-Michael Brown we see ascending public anger within the African American community, but also more widely, as most solidarity rallies in these cases have been mixed race. Although the old tactics of vilifying Michael Brown’s character, denouncing “violent” protesters, and even unironically invoking “outside agitators” were all pulled out, none seemed to stick much. This is not to underestimate continuing resistance to confronting racism, even in its most violent manifestations at the hands of the police; only to note that the terrain seems more open for challenge than it has in some time. Particularly notable was the migration of the term “the militarization of the police” from the margins to mainstream publications. Although many people on the left justifiably worry that the "militarization" question will obscure ongoing racism at the hands of police with ordinary weapons, "militarization of the police" has disrupted the high esteem of the police among the American public, politicians, and media more than any time I can remember.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In thinking about this opening, it is worth noting the diversity of approaches on display in Ferguson. While the response to the Rodney King verdict was a five day riot, from the start in Ferguson there have been large conventional demonstrations. These demonstrations produced the memorable slogan “hands up/don’t shoot” (reportedly Michael Brown’s last words) and the image of collectively raising hands above heads. But there was also the more militant practice of pushing back against the police, looting, etc. It was probably the latter that intensified the overreaction by the police that consolidated Ferguson as an international story. Ferguson is actually only the latest in a series of unruly community responses to police shootings (a number of whose victims were Latino or white) in the last few years in places including Anaheim, Durham, Albuquerque, and East Flatbush. It was only a matter of time before one of these situations broke through. To explain Ferguson, some observers have<a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/rebellion_in_ferguson_a_rising_heat_in_the_suburbs_20140817" target="_blank"> pointed to the mismatch between the demographics of the police force (almost entirely white) and the population</a>, while others have noted the novelty of trying to repress riotous behavior in suburbs. Regardless, it should be apparent that it resonated in places quite different--places with more diverse police forces or "traditional" urban neighborhoods.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And now that it has broken through... It is clear the case has generated intense reflection within the African American community, particularly among younger people. To some degree, Ferguson seemed to mark the end of an era of leadership epitomized by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, neither of whom was able to capture the spirit of the uprising and point a way forward. Ferguson has generated a huge response on traditionally African American campuses, even though it is the middle of the summer. It has also spread to additional campuses for the Monday August 25 Hands Up Walk Out action. There have also been protests, some peaceful, others a little unruly, although none rising (or sinking, depending on ones perspective) to the status of “riot” in numerous cities. Pictures I’ve seen suggest multiracial crowds. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Waves of protest matter, but one of the more poorly understood ways they matter is to baptize people, through direct action, into enduring political commitment. This only occurs with a small portion of the protesters, but they become the core that pushes additional movements forward. Looking around, they may find that there are already budding movements in the African American community around foreclosures, education, low wage workers as well as a number of criminal justice issues. Indeed, <a href="http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2014/08/ferguson-string-betrayals" target="_blank">it was apparently a core of activists in these movements in Ferguson who organized many of the demonstrations about Michael Brown</a>. Although questions of police, and trying to focus an agenda into a couple of demands that might make a difference is likely to be the highest priority, it does not require an advance degree in Marxism to recognize that the crisis in Ferguson and other places like it is much broader than questions of criminal justice. Perhaps the experiment with solidarity economics in Jackson Mississippi that was spearheaded by the election of Chockwe Lumumba and then tragically cut short by his death will be seen as a touchstone in the creation of a broader project. Need it be said that while one can reference all of these struggles within the African American community, they are simultaneously class based struggles of importance to people of all races in the United States? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is no reason to be excessively optimistic about either Gaza or Ferguson. Even fairly minimal demands--fully lifting the siege of Gaza, or national legislation curtailing police abuse--is likely to prove elusive without struggle, and these sorts of steps are really only the beginning of a much larger struggle to actually achieve justice. Nor would I want the above to be read as minimizing the ongoing human tragedies in both places. But as we mourn the losses, we should also be cognizant of what has opened up. Israel’s mighty military and America’s militarized police proved ineffectual at subduing and repressing poorly armed or unarmed opponents. The movement of repression and resistance has opened up cracks in ideological structures that can and must be widened. It is a moment fraught with possibility.</span></div>
Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-76798476986446608132014-03-08T14:22:00.000-08:002014-03-09T06:06:11.310-07:00Adolph Reed is Wrong: There is Something Left<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIC4MybGgKBWS2yfjPwkzmoeQ-5JDdQTTXr4ikre0yoB_B3JM1UjieD0_dZvFjxqxLfECCZsKnTpcdlFZqoWt-Aol-_rQZsZUxPJj4ocy4XqlxnvXAd3SDpkT4kb4t3iH3-F7jxnso77z/s1600/adolph-reed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIC4MybGgKBWS2yfjPwkzmoeQ-5JDdQTTXr4ikre0yoB_B3JM1UjieD0_dZvFjxqxLfECCZsKnTpcdlFZqoWt-Aol-_rQZsZUxPJj4ocy4XqlxnvXAd3SDpkT4kb4t3iH3-F7jxnso77z/s1600/adolph-reed.jpg" height="247" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adolph Reed</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed has an <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/" target="_blank">important piece</a> on the left in the current issue of Harper's called "Nothing Left: The Long Slow Surrender of American Liberals".It is filled with anger and despair. Left Business Observer Doug Henwood has been arguing on facebook that those critical of Reed are wrong in arguing that he doesn't clarify what is to be done, that to diagnose the dismal situation of the left is enough. Indeed. The problem is not that he doesn't present a ten point plan to rebuild the left. In fact, he explicitly, if briefly, outlines what he thinks is a way forward at the end of the article. The problem is that he misdiagnoses the existing left. Here I want to suggest alternative interpretations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Reed's essay is divided into a three parts--a brief history of the American left in the twentieth century, a lengthy mid-section denouncing the excessive focus on elections and particularly the high hopes placed on Barack Obama, and a brief focus at the end on the contemporary left and how it might be rebuilt--this last section itself interrupted by several more paragraphs denouncing Obama. I'll consider mostly the historical and proscriptive sections. For Reed, "<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">For nearly all the twentieth century there was a dynamic left in the United States grounded in the belief that unrestrained capitalism generated unacceptable social costs. That left crested in influence between 1935 and 1945, when it anchored a coalition centered in the labor movement, most significantly within the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It was a prominent voice in the Democratic Party of the era, and at the federal level its high point may have come in 1944, when FDR propounded what he called “a second Bill of Rights.”</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> ...</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">The labor-left alliance remained a meaningful presence in American politics through the 1960s. What have become known as the social movements of the Sixties — civil rights activism, protests against the Vietnam War, and a renewed women’s movement — were vitally linked to that egalitarian left. Those movements drew institutional resources, including organizing talents and committed activists, from that older left and built on both the legislative and the ideological victories it had won. But during the 1980s and early 1990s, fears of a relentless Republican juggernaut pressured those left of center to take a defensive stance, focusing on the immediate goal of electing Democrats to stem or slow the rightward tide.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> " After berating the left for embracing Obama, he makes this snide declaration: "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">"</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash an old quip, if you have no destination, any direction can seem as good as any other. The left careens from this oppressed group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the Zapatistas; the urban “precariat”; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT “community”; the grassroots, the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season’s worthless Democrat; Occupy; a “Trotskyist” software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability; its métier is bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its reflex is to “send messages” to those in power, to make statements, and to stand with or for the oppressed.""</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">This is, to say the least, an odd history of the left. Entirely omitted from the first period is the presence of the Communist Party, a key driver of the organizing of the CIO, and the initiator of prominent anti-racist struggles. The CP went into demise as a result of the contradictions posed by its allegiance to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which first resulted in endorsing the Hitler-Stalin pact, and then, perhaps more importantly, embracing World War II, resulted in calling off all domestic struggles and the demise of the party as a significant force in American life. Some unions were under communist leadership, adapting more progressive positions on most matters, but when the red scare hit, these unions were simultaneously unable to shake the communist taint and bereft of effective direction from an isolated and out of touch party leadership. The broader labor movement, although possessing massive heft in US society at this point, had limited left influence. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Not surprisingly, when social struggles reemerged in the late fifties and sixties, it was isolated from the bastions of the old left, namely the CP, and was not readily embraced by the labor movement. Instead, the civil rights movement and the student anti-war movement drew from other wellsprings. The small pacifist movement of WWII produced a more impressive roster of elder statesmen who counseled the new movements--including Staughton Lynd, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, and A.J. Muste-- than either the CP or the labor movement. The movements themselves drew their leadership and members from new forces in American life--the African American clergy and residents of the urbanizing South, and expanding centers of higher education. The labor movement was not entirely absent--the UAW was a prominent endorser of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom, and the UAW later left the AFL-CIO for a time in protest over its pro-war stance--but it could hardly be considered a key player in either movement.Furthermore, the backing of labor provided the context for the social democratic measures of Medicaid, Medicare, and public sector unions. Soon enough two Democratic administrations had launched the US into war in Vietnam, which the labor movement largely supported, at first, and which made the alliance between left forces and the Democratic Party completely untenable. </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Women's and gay rights movements fed on energies and organizing skills developed in the student/anti-war and civil rights movement, not labor unions. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">When many within the new left became more radical after 1965, they became more isolated from labor. Although significant forces, including the Black Panthers and the Poor People's Campaign, to mention two with very different approaches, recognized the urgent need for a multiracial coalition rooted in the working class, the labor movement was basically MIA. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">For that matter, several of the most urgent labor struggles of the time--the UFW, or the Charleston hospital workers--seem to exist more in the context of new left activism than in the mainstream of the labor movement.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">As parts of the new left fought for entrance into the Democratic Party--inside the convention in 1964 through the Mississippi Freedom Party, or through the McCarthy campaign in 1968, the labor movement was largely indifferent or hostile. When the goal was achieved in 1972, the unions basically abandoned George McGovern, the most pro-labor candidate ever nominated by a major party, facilitating a landslide by Nixon. In the context of accelerating speed ups to meet international competition, and corrupt union leadership, there was a grassroots union rebellion in the early 70s--too late for the now dispersed energy of the new left.None of the "new communist parties" of the seventies had a strong connection to the existing labor movement, and efforts to organize workers outside of its framework (and there were many) didn't amount to much. In a second-time-as-farce repitition of the perils of orienting parties around states' foreign policies, some followed Mao into a cuckoo world where Soviet socialist imperialism constituted the main enemy. Meanwhile, the unions largely ignored the storm clouds rapidly developing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">A sort of anarchist radicalism that had emerged in the anti-war movement (for example, the May Day Tribe in 1971) evolved into the anti-nuclear movement, although this too seemed remote from the concerns of labor. The point here is not to bash the working class or the labor movement, or for that matter the new left--there is a complicated history there, with some ambiguities--but simply to note that the period of 1935 to 1975 was not one of a left-liberal coalition moving from one reform to the next. It was instead filled with ruptures within the left and frequent conservatism on the part of labor. It is probably worth keeping in mind the predominantly white male character of labor unions in this period, particularly the older craft unions. White workers were fairly easily drawn into identifying with the settler colonialist narrative of US nationalism. That the Soviet Union was dominating what were often their homelands in Eastern Europe in the name of socialism didn't help matters either.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">The seventies were also a sour time for liberals. It began well enough, with liberals belatedly assenting to anti-war sentiment and pushing for "reform" in congress, leading to watergate and the deposing of Nixon after his electoral landslide. But there was no coherent liberal program to deal with the economic crisis of the early seventies. Liberals also were crucial to reviving anti-communism. And after the rebellions of the late sixties and early seventies, there was no renewal of alliances between white liberals and racial minorities and unions. Instead, the drift towards neoliberalism accelerated. The rightward turn of The New York Review of Books and the ascendancy of The New Republic epitomized the right leaning centrism that would constitute the intellectual climate for American liberals for most of the remainder of the century.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">When I became involved with the left in the late eighties, social movements remained isolated from organized labor, although overheated rhetoric about imperialist labor aristocracies was largely forgotten. Solidarity with Central America, anti-apartheid, ACT-UP--these were not labor's struggles. To the extent that they had any heft beyond an activist milieu, they were rooted in such institutions as churches (including the Quakers, the Catholic churches that served immigrant populations), university students, and the gay community. The union movement was occasionally visible in my circles through seemingly quixotic campaigns signified by words like Hormel. For the most part, after PATCO, it was retreat, retreat, retreat for a dazed and sclerotic labor movement. There was nothing like an effective socialist left organization. The remains of the new communist movement were able to pull themselves together enough to play a significant role in the two presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, which Reed devoted an entire book to disparaging. Jackson revived the dream of a multiracial coalition, reusing the slogan of the Chicago Black Panthers, "the rainbow coalition." Particularly in 1988, the campaign managed to attract the votes of substantial numbers of union members. However, the rainbow coalition vanished with the end of Jesse Jackson's campaigns, although some of its networks helped lay the groundwork for the labor community coalitions that were beginning to emerge in many cities.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">The nineties were a very difficult time for the left. There were occasional heartening moments like the Teamsters strike and students against sweatshops, but for the most part it was a decade of disorientation. A key factor was the demise of the Soviet empire, and the related negotiated settlements in Central America. In retrospect, this seems strange. It was apparent to most activists--although not all--that whatever utopian hopes the Soviet Union once embodied had been extinguished long before it collapsed. And marxist leninism, as well as its Trotskyist and Maoist variants, were basically failures, not only in the US, but all the wealthier countries, at least if one measures success or failure by the question of a seizure of state power, which these ideologies universally valorized. Mostly they were failures even if one hopes for a much more modest but real impact on the larger society. Nevertheless, the fall of the Soviet empire was severely disorienting. In addition, not only in the US, but in most countries Social Democratic parties were in full retreat in the nineties. The Zapatista rebellion opened up questions of rethinking the relationship between liberation and the seizure of state power, but it hardly substituted for the demise of the grand narrative that had ordered left struggles for most of the century.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">A few developments in the nineties should be noted. A number of multicultural struggles which had been waged since the sixties were being digested by the body politic. Secondly, labor unions, which were basically continuing their retreat, did wage some struggles that opened up new possibilities. For example, the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles was indicative of both working with immigrants and using civil disobedience tactics borrowed from the social movements of the sixties. Relatively progressive leadership, which was more willing to recognize the crisis of labor, ascended to the top of the AFL-CIO, and encouraged a substantial minority of the (typically white, college-educated) activist strata to gain some experience as union organizers, a practice that continues to the present. </span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">Finally, the decade was bookended by two earthquakes--the L.A. riots which followed the Rodney King verdict and the "battle of Seattle" at the WTO meeting in 1999. The former was a multiracial riot, in contrast to those of the sixties, and probably the largest riot in the history of the US. The after effects of the LA riot were very limited and mostly subterranean. The WTO protests marked the stunning return of the anarchistic direct action current, which had been bubbling around for decades but never before produced anything so massive and disruptive, and the emergence of an uneasy coalition between this current, the labor movement, and environmental NGOs. It seemed like a new day for the left, but follow up was weak. There were other mobilizations against IMF meetings and free trade negotiations in the US, but none had the same magic. It was never clear what those of us who lived far from the centers of action were supposed to do to participate, especially in between major moblizations. A certain amount of energy was directed into the Nader campaign, which simultaneously failed to get close to the 5% benchmark supporters were claiming would constitute a breakthrough, while managing to get enough votes in New Hampshire and Florida to plausibly cast Nader as spoiler, heightening tensions between the left and liberals. Both the WTO protests and the Nader campaign indicated that Clinton's deepening of neoliberalism (NAFTA, welfare reform, etc) was fraying the Democratic party base. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">The Bush administration helped insure that that energy would mostly be rechanneled into partisan liberalism for the next decade, and, for the moment, the tears in the Democratic coalition would be papered over. The left and liberals shared horror at the rightward turn of the Bush administration and the invasion of two countries in the wake of 9-11. A large anti-war movement materialized, with several socialist groups providing much of the underpinning, but from the start it had a strong tone of partisanship to it. In other words, it blended anger at the war with anger towards the Republicans, not really laying the basis for a strong anti-imperialist current. Earlier anti-war movements, produced, among the left, romantic identification with the foes of the US--the NLF, the FMLN, etc. This helped produce an energetic core of activists to carry on through the slower moments, something notably lacking in the changed environment of the aughts. Labor, African American, and anarchist currents were mostly invisible during the Bush administration. Immigrants generated a major protest movement, pretty much outside of the traditional channels of left activity, however broadly defined, culminating in a revival of May Day as a day of labor action. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">But for the most part, in the aughts, the left of center belonged to liberals. Figures like Paul Krugman and Keith Olbermann, organizations like Move On were characteristic. There was some sense here that the Clinton adminstration had drifted too far rightward, but most if not all anger was channeled towards the Republicans. Alarmed at the direction of the Bush administration, the left tailed the liberals into first the Dean campaign, and then the John "anybody but Bush" Kerry campaign. After four more listless years, liberals scored a modest victory by displacing the candidate of the center, Hillary Clinton, with one who was perceived as one of their own--Barack Obama. Both left and liberals cried tears of joy when Obama was elected, defying skeptics <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/30/the_politics_of_the_rev_wright" target="_blank"> including Adolph Reed himself</a>, who claimed the American public would never vote for an African American. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">And then Obama took office, and immediately made clear that he planned to closely follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton. At this point, the coalition on the left began to fracture. Many liberals followed him through every twist and turn, every betrayal and hollow compromise, claiming he was playing "twelve dimensional chess," i.e. acting in a fashion so sophisticated that many couldn't follow his brilliance. Many on the far left went quickly into denunciation mode. Some, including early Obama skeptic Paul Krugman, charted a middle course of sorts. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">For the first three years of the Obama administration, social movements on the left were largely quiet. The anti-war movement did not move back into the street in the context of the winding down of Iraq, a mixture of escalation and disengagement in Afghanistan, and the escalation of drone strikes and failure to close Guatanamo. Nor were the labor movements, African American movement, or direct action movement visible. A DC protest, "One Nation," called by the NAACP and many unions, occupied an uneasy space between dissatisfaction with the administration and calls to elect more Democrats in 2010. It was little noted in the mass media and failed to galvanize the left.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Into the vacuum raced the Tea Party, appealing to that portion of the population terrified that a Black president would lead the charge of the disenfranchised to appropriate their limited wealth and entitlements. More importantly, perhaps, the political right refocused its sites on state governments.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">This provided the context for the first major left protest movement of the Obama years, the Wisconsin uprising. Union led protesters took over the state capital to stop a bill that would have eliminated collective bargaining rights. The protest was inspiring because labor unions in the US had not in recent memory taken such an audacious step. Furthermore, some signs aligned the spirit of the protesters with the Arab Spring. Still, several aspects conspired against this becoming a larger movement. The unions who led the struggle were uneasy about turning it into a class based struggle by more firmly tethering themselves to the victims of the right wing governor's budget cuts, the dread specter of poor African Americans. Instead, they sought to appeal to a perceived middle class majority through a recall election. Having already escalated into unfamiliar territory through an occupation of the state capital, they were unwilling to take the next steps into the even more perilous territory of politically oriented strike activity. Finally, as the entire logic of the struggle was rooted in confrontation with a right wing governor, the struggle could not really be replicated nation wide. Many of us nationwide might cheer the occupation of the capital, or order a pizza for the protesters, but the applicability of the struggle to a state like New York, where a Democratic governor respects the rights of unions even as he guts the substance, was less than clear. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">During the spring and summer of 2011, attempts were made to pick up the pace of protest around the dismal state of the American political economy. A large demonstration against Wall Street was held in New York City by a coalition of unions and community groups. Several unions attempted to jump start discussion of income inequality during the summer. Still, such efforts had limited impact. Then people responded to Adbusters' call to "Occupy Wall Street." Rooted in the direct action current, Occupy did go viral, and did finally put "income inequality" into the national discussion. It had a simple slogan, "We are the 99%." It had a simple tactic that could be, and was, reproduced all over the country--create an encampment. Stay at the encampment. Or visit it. Or participate in protests called by it. Or argue about it over facebook. However incoherently, Occupy also posed the question of radicalism--the overall legitimacy of the social order-- in ways that none of the movements of the aughts had. What Occupy lacked was a strategy for maintaining a viable organization once state repression decimated the encampments. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Nevertheless, the inequality cat was out of the bag. Emboldened, labor unions began experimenting with more confrontational tactics in organizing campaigns at Walmart and fast food establishments, where the more traditional tactics of the last few decades had not proven effective. Movements against foreclosures persisted even after Occupy faded. Chicago teachers struck and won with community support. Elizabeth Warren ran for senate basically with the focus on being a gadfly of Wall Street. The Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, led by the NAACP but including many social justice organizations in the state, combined urgent civil rights concerns--for example, voting rights--with a broad focus on social and economic justice.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Additionally, almost simultaneous with Occupy, campaigns against the criminalization of African American men stepped up. The New Jim Crow was a surprise bestseller. The effort to stop the execution of Troy Davis was the first such campaign in recent memory to truly go national. It was followed by the much larger campaign around justice for Trayvon Martin. These campaigns have been led by forces within the African American community, but warmly embraced by the Occupy generation of activists.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">The new wave of activism also helped jump start women's activism, particularly against the paleo-Republicans in power in various states. Climate change activism has gotten livelier. The Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign against Israel is finally gaining some traction.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">In general, we seem to have entered a period of activism and experimentation. The fulcrum of this process is the question of income inequality, but by no means can all the movements that are becoming more visible be reduced to this. Not surprisingly, this activism also has electoral components. Reed maligns Kshama Sawant as one more fashion the left jumps on, but she won a seat on the Seattle City Council through a hard fought grass roots campaign. Both the campaign, and her actions in office, have intensified the fight for a citywide $15 minimum wage. New York now has a mayor close to various community non-profits and labor unions. By no means perfect, his election nevertheless opened up space to critique the Bloomberg years and the direction of development in NYC in general. I suspect within the next eight years there will be a significant populist challenge in the Democratic primaries for president. While the left is not strong enough to conduct such a campaign on its own, ultimately depending on relatively well established politicians deciding to run, such a campaign would likely energize the left, swell its numbers, and expand the circle of people debating left ideas.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Reed complains that the left lacks a vision. In fact, lots of people have explored ideas about how to have better cities, live within the constraints of the ecosphere, mechanisms for more economic equality, etc. The problem is, absent a mass movement, such explorations mostly become fodder for academic conferences. It is when people are actively contesting structures that questions and answers can more meaningfully be posed. We are against schools dominated by testing and which reduce students into one size fits all widgets requiring college preparedness. What are we for? We are against Keystone XL. What sorts of energy policies do we want? etc. One of the most admirable features of the Occupy movement was its agora format, both in the encampments and on social media, which facilitated raising these questions. I thought that while it was going on, the level of discussion on the left improved precipitously. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Rather than berating the left for jumping from one trend to the next, Reed, and the rest of us, would do better to ponder the actually existing multiplicity of movements and ways to bring them into coalition, or at least productive tension with each other. Looking at the history of the last forty years or so that I've outlined above, it seems apparent to me that while none of the major currents active in the US (including African Americans and other racial minorities, labor unions, anti-war, direct action, gender and gay rights movements, and even left parties) are exactly strong, they are closer to each other than they have probably ever been before. While Reed disparages the left for going in many directions, he is really doing nothing more than calling attention to the reality that there are many sites for contemporary struggle. This is not a bad thing nor particularly surprising. One could debate whether a formalized organization on the left might facilitate further unification of these struggles or their amplification, or whether the debate in places like Facebook and various websites, social forums, etc is sufficient. I am not convinced that a structure resembling any of the really existing parties of the left would help much. But the starting point for a strengthening of the left has to be a recognition of the significant work being done in different places, not another effort to a priori privilege the labor movement.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></span></span>Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-5329980795597180072014-02-24T16:22:00.000-08:002014-02-24T16:22:57.207-08:00Is Obama's America a Conservative Paradise?An <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/barack-obamas-conservative-utopia?src=nl" target="_blank">article in Esquire</a>, of all places, makes an argument about Obama fairly common on the American left. In "Barack Obama's Conservative Utopia," writer Michael Maiello asserts that far from being the socialist of American conservatives' nightmares, Obama has in fact "created a conservative America." He identifies seven metrics to prove this point--Taxing the Rich (down), Fracking (up), Abortion (down), Deportations (up), Defense Spending (up), and Corporate Profits (up). Plenty of questions could be raised. For example, do conservatives really want fewer abortions? Much more prominent is their drive to criminalize abortion. In societies where abortion is illegal, rates are often quite high. The real issue for conservatives is women's autonomy and sexual freedom, or rather limiting both, and so I think they would react with horror to Maiello's explanation for the drop: "Under Obama, the number of women accessing contraceptives through public means has increased." Taxes raise similar questions. Maiello ignores the taxes implemented through Obamacare. Those he does focus on indicate a modest increase since Bush, but lower than the top tax rates under Clinton. Not exactly a dramatic tax break for the wealthy. Graphs included representing trends in fracking and deportations indicate that these trends were rising before Obama took office, and, in the case of deportations, the rate of increase slows under Obama, while fracking continued to rapidly expand.<br />
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All in all, the evidence presented here doesn't make a very convincing case that Obama has created much of anything. I suspect that Maiello is basically a libertarian troll, trying to confuse already demoralized liberals, but, I should add, his views parallel many of those on the left, such as <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/81/perry-anderson-homeland" target="_blank">Perry Anderson</a>, who outlined a similar argument using more and larger words. If Anderson (among others) doesn't make foolish claims about Obama "creating" conservative America, the argument is nevertheless also that virtually nothing much has changed (I finished writing this before seeing <a href="http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-long-slow-surrender-of-american-liberals/" target="_blank">this piece</a> by Adolph Reed, which is of the same ilk, albeit more insulting about the left, which Maiello and Anderson basically ignore).<br />
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Putting aside the dubious case of abortion, what we have here are a series of long term trends--low taxes on the rich, expanded militarism, deportations, etc. that Obama has failed to reverse. Similarly, Obama promptly moved from a modest stimulus to deficit reduction in the context of intense political and media pressure that he do so. People today look back on the world of the eighties and may say that Reagan "created" an America (sic) of low taxes, deregulation, renewed militarism, nativism, abandonment of efforts to rectify racism… This is an oversimplification. All of these trends were already in evidence by 1978, under his Democratic predecessor Carter. Nevertheless, Reagan did embolden the forces pushing the state in this direction, and crushed the spirit of those opposing them, and so he deserves at least some of the credit or blame, depending on how you see these developments. Obama, far from being a "transformative" president (how Obama himself described Reagan) has mostly gone with the drift of history, which has been to both preserve the inequities introduced in the Reagan era and to modify them with reforms circumscribed by neoliberal logic. Obama has pushed for reforms that might alarm conservatives in a number of areas -- health care, banking regulation, stimulus, immigration -- but always in ways that seek to salve business interests first and foremost.<br />
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But--and this is really the key point--if I were a conservative, I would be at least concerned, if not horrified at the direction things have been going in the last few years, notwithstanding that everything cannot be laid at the feet of Obama, and it is indeed preposterous to regard him as a "socialist." First off, we might mention a few side issues. Here is how Maiello describes gay marriage and marijuana legalization: "states have acted in lieu of the Feds, serving as the laboratories of democracy that conservatives have long claimed they should be." Translation--victories are being consolidated in both gay marriage and marijuana legalization in blue states. Obama has very belatedly gone with the flow in both cases, giving gentle but unmistakable pushes. For all the talk of states rights, it is hard to see how to seriously pursue drug or marriage policies that vary much from state to state. Indeed, courts in red states appear to be beginning to undo gay marriage bans put into state constitutions in the last decade. So our conservative friend is likely to be alarmed by these defeats, on an issue of great importance for the maintenance of traditional gender roles on the one hand and of great importance to the "war on drugs" mass incarceration craze on the other. Still, I consider these side issues to the extent that victories do not directly challenge the power of what Occupy Wall Street called "the 1%."<br />
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While the US has always had a ruling class with a great deal of power over the state, the most recent phase of inequality, and the transformation of the state from having some semblance of redistributive downward/inclusionary policies to redistributive upward/exclusionary basically dates from the Reagan era, and has alarmingly accelerated in the last ten years or so. This concentration of power, and its flip side, the expansion of the surveillance and incarceration state, can justifiably be considered the central issue of our time, although we must also add the empire behavior of the US that has accelerated since 9-11. How do things look on these fronts? On the one hand, things have just been going on and on in the same direction, and Obama seems to have no real problem with that. The banks were bailed out, and far from launching criminal investigations into top executives, Obama did not so much as encourage the firing of this strata as a precondition for the bailouts. Indeed, he praised some of the shadiest bankers. We seem to be stuck in deficit cutting hell, notwithstanding the vast numbers of long term unemployed and the declining prospects for recent college grads. The US remains the world leader in mass incarceration, while the Snowden leaks have revealed the massive intrusion of another portion of the surveillance state that most people were only very dimly aware of six years ago. The US retains its warlike posture in the Middle East, and drone and special forces operations seem to be dispersing to endless sites worldwide. So the picture is pretty grim. And for the most part, Obama has done little more than try to repackage this material for liberal consumption.<br />
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But the picture is also more contradictory than that. The bankers seemed to have gotten away with everything, but then Occupy Wall Street exploded onto the scene. The most viral of social movements since the sixties (at least), Occupy was striking for directing rage at the 1%, and not neatly fitting into the two party framework (as the Iraq anti-war movement ultimately did, notwithstanding the failure of the Democrats to offer robust opposition to the war). Since Occupy, the issue of banks has been reopened, just a little, with, for example, the J.P. Morgan settlement. Elizabeth Warren was elected to the Senate, and has played the role of gadfly surprisingly well. Furthermore, on a number of fronts, Obama has not been able to advance the neoliberal agenda. Larry Summers was clearly his choice to lead the fed, but had to be withdrawn. The Trans-Pacific Partnership seems less and less likely to pass, although we shouldn't rule out yet another effort once we are passed the midterm elections. Obama himself barely mentioned it in the State of the Union, instead, focusing on income inequality. At least that seemed to be the takeaway. Some stories noted that his language has shifted away from inequality towards opportunity, generally considered a Republican theme, but I am not sure how clearly this registered. <br />
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On other fronts as well, I see contradictory movement. Recently Defense Secretary Robert Gates' memoirs were published. Clearly an attack from the right by a Washington insider, they were widely hailed in the US media. Obama was portrayed as being uninterested in vigorously pursuing the war in Afghanistan, and this was portrayed, both by Gates and in the media coverage, as a failing of Obama's, notwithstanding that about 70% of the American public seems to agree with him. Obama did in fact agree to a "surge" in Afghanistan and has pursued an agreement to keep US forces in Afghanistan until 2024, but apparently he has not done so with enough enthusiasm for many Washington insiders. The sort of mixed picture presented here is also borne out in a couple of other recent policy decisions. Obama moved towards striking Syria in the context of accusations about the usage of chemical weapons, but quickly backed down in the face of little public support and likely congressional opposition. In the midst of this, Secretary of State John Kerry made his bizarre fumble, attempting to simultaneously advocate the attacks and minimize them. Retrospectively, many Obama fans tried to argue that the entire war drive was a successful bluff, but this does not seem likely. Rather I would suggest that it failed in part because it was carried out with little conviction. At the time, Obama seemed to be caving in to pressure to do something about Syria, rather than initiating a full-press propaganda blitz necessary to sell such an attack to the American public.<br />
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And then there is the question of Iran. Notwithstanding promises to move towards engagement, Obama wasted his first term continuing the confrontational policies of his predecessor. But since the election of Rouhani, as well as the introduction of a slightly more liberal team for foreign policy in the Obama administration, there has been some movement. And there is also pushback from the more right wing elements of the Democratic Party and much of the establishment media. The American public seems to sort of understand that the U.S. no longer has the financial means or military capability to rule the world. The US has conducted a number of military strikes over the last decade, and while it is capable of toppling governments, little more seems to be accomplished, and forces not easily controlled by the US or friendly to it come to the fore. Obama appears to be taking some steps to adjust to this reality, but strong pressure persists in Washington to continue pretending the US can maintain its posture. Meanwhile, trying to exert force on the cheap through drone strikes and special forces deployments remains largely uncontroversial, notwithstanding its ineffectiveness as a way to exercise power in the world.<br />
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Speaking of running empire on the cheap, we must also touch on the NSA. Recently, <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it%27s_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/" target="_blank">Alfred McCoy </a>argued that the principle reason for the NSA's relentless data collecting is to find information on private scandals worldwide, and then use that information for blackmailing purposes to keep policy makers in line. The US has done this in low-tech ways in the past. And this is at least as plausible as claims that the NSA fights terrorism, as are claims that the NSA is being used for industrial espionage. The important point to make about the NSA is that the American public seems not particularly convinced by the argument that it is fighting terrorism and therefore needs to be left alone. This makes for a pronounced change from ten years ago, when Snowden's leaks would have likely been overwhelmed by "fighting terrorism" rhetoric. Obama has been terrible on this issue. Apart from efforts to maintain the NSA, we could point to the related issue of the persecution of Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers. Still, our conservative friend should hardly be sanguine about the growing unease with the surveillance state.<br />
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Nor should he be pleased with developments around mass incarceration, where Obama has played a slightly more mixed role. Here, as elsewhere, Obama has matched a certain rhetorical adjustment to the new mood, registering concern about the massive numbers incarcerated, with rather feeble measures. But our conservative friend would have to be blind not to notice that the "tough on crime" mass incarceration rhetoric has grown stale and no longer seems to strike fear into most of the population.<br />
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Rather than take solace in Obama's many sellouts and compromises, our conservative friend, and for that matter leftists, would be better off examining the evolution of US society and politics as a whole. In 2008, a majority voted for reforms (in its own way, this was the culmination of a drift leftward among much of the middle class that began ten years earlier, notwithstanding George Bush's electoral victories, such as they were). The reforms that have passed since have been so larded up with corporate giveaways that trying to figure out whether there is a kernel worth supporting turns into a depressing question, to say the least. But this hasn't really dimmed the quest for a US that moves away from empire, plutocracy, and mass incarceration. There is quite a bit more agitation on most of these questions than there was six years ago. Sometimes it is Occupy where that agitation is focused, at others times low wage workers, or victims of police brutality, or efforts to push back against the corporate destruction of public education. The corporate center epitomized by Obama is no longer able to sell snake oil like the Trans Pacific Partnership. The right is locked into minority politics for the time being by the obduracy of the tea party crowd. However, a great deal of inertia remains with current policies. Thirty years of these policies has driven unions close to the point of extinction and left the population of the US atomized and disoriented. The question for the next ten or even twenty years is whether the left can shape the thousand--or at least a hundred--points of light and resistance now twinkling in the US into a coherent project.<br />
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Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-11554603040516009762014-02-02T05:15:00.000-08:002014-02-02T05:15:12.594-08:00Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookid=10963" target="_blank"><i>We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement</i></a> by Akinyele Omowale Umoja is as provocative as it sounds. Tracing a tradition of armed self defense of the African American community before, during and after the visible heyday of the Civil Rights Movement in the early sixties, the text suggests a new way of understanding the relationship of that movement to the use of force. And it is not only a matter of self defense--at times violence was used to further the goals of the movement. The book unsettles a narrative, widespread in the media and influential on the left, that the movement achieved its goal of desegregating the South by taking the moral high road and through the use of non-violent civil disobedience discredited its opponents, whose cruelty was exposed. In turn, the federal government was impelled to act, passing crucial legislation, i.e. the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. These in turn promptly led to the dismantling of Jim Crow structures. In the context of the failure of the Democratic Party to embrace the movement by seating the Mississippi Freedom Party rather than the Jim Crow delegates at the 1964 and the turn towards more intractable economic issues and Black Power, the question of violence was opened, and growing numbers in the movement embraced it. Depending on ones outlook, this was either a tragic error that invited government repression or a step towards revolution, aborted by forces outside the movement's control.<br />
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Umoja's narrative is quite different. Armed self defense was a long standing tradition in the South, due to constant threat of white supremacist violence. Some Blacks would keep firearms in their homes and return fire from night riders and other white supremacist vigilantes. When Civil Rights activism started to accelerate, it was a necessity, due to the intensity of the violent response, the collusion of local law enforcement with white supremacists, and the failure of the federal government to consistently protect movement activists. Early on, there was interest in the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and their parallels to the struggles of African Americans. These anti-colonial struggles were all typically violent. In this context, strict codes of non-violence appear as an importation that always had limited support. And when non-violent groups were most active in the state, they often adopted to grim realities of Mississippi life by accepting offers for self-defense. The Deacons of Defense, an armed group in Louisiana, inspired imitators in Mississippi.<br />
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Although the Black Panthers didn't have much of a presence in Mississippi (but see below), Black nationalism does register in <i>We Will Shoot Bac</i>k. It's particular form is the Republic of New Africa (RNA), an effort to assert a nation composed of Black Belt regions in the South. Participants adopted armed self defense, which the author claims may have saved lives when the police confronted them over a dispute over land. In contrast to the other struggles described in <i>We Will Shoot Back</i>, the Republic of New Africa seems arbitrary and imposed from above. Although it never came close to its goal of a new country and pulling the United Nations in as arbitrar of the status of African Americans, it nevertheless raises similar questions as other efforts to create homelands for people, namely, how many African Americans would actually want to move to such a place, and what would happen to the indigeneous population already present?<br />
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During and after the RNA, civil rights struggles, backed by self defense, continued in Mississippi. Although there is a tendency to declare Jim Crow dead following passage of the Civil Rights Act, struggles continued into the late seventies around fairly basic demands such as having African Americans on the police force. These struggles were often powered by the emergence of the United League, a more militant alternative to the NAACP, which developed effective strategies involving boycotts in small cities backed by enforcement squads which would intimidate those within the African American community unwilling to support the boycotts (it might be noted here that many labor struggles in the US have used similar amounts of violent intimidation to enforce compliance).<br />
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Of the many stories of self defense recounted in <i>We Will Shoot Back</i>, three in particular stood out for me. In 1961, in Tylertown Mississippi, SNCC workers were told that several months before their arrival, the town had been terrorized by nightriders. Warnings that the terrorism must cease were ignored. African Americans apparently connected to a fraternal order captured one of the nightriders. His head was severed from his body and placed on a bridge as a warning to whites. The terrorism stopped.<br />
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The second incident occurred during a boycott in Aberdeen Mississippi in 1970. The context for the boycott was the suspension of two African American police officers for refusing to wear confederate symbols. Organizer Rudy Shields had a friend bring a contingent of Black males from another town to Aberdeen. Amidst rumors that the Black Panthers had arrived, the young men marched through town, striking fear among both white business owners who hoped to break the boycott and Black consumers who were not yet on board. The fear of militant, armed members of a revolutionary organization was more potent than the reality, and helped to strengthen the boycott.<br />
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The third incident happened amidst the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 70s. In Tupelo in 1978, the aforementioned United League led a boycott of White owned businesses around demands relating both to racism of the police and failures to expand economic opportunities for Blacks. Tensions rose as the Klan joined the battle to break the boycott. The city council tried to appear above the fray, equating the struggle for social justice with Klan terrorism and trying to stop the protests of both. In this fraught environment, the United League brought arms to demonstrations, and had scouts on rooftops searching for snipers and other dangers. Things came to a head on June 10, when the United League held a demonstration in downtown Tupelo, and the Klan held a counterdemonstration. The UL's demonstration was more than twice as large. No violence occurred, but "local Blacks were emboldened by the greater numbers of UL protesters and took the opportunity of the Klan counterprotest to unleash verbal assaults at White supremacists for years of racial intimidation and terror." Sixty four year old Jack Clark told reporters "We used to have get off the sidewalks for White folks.. and them Klansmen, wooie boy, you didn't go messin' with them. But now I tell them, "go to hell."" Umoja attributes the new attitude not only to the size of the United League demonstration, but to the presence of armed Blacks. The release from fear of the Klan provides a stark contrast with the more famous incident in Greensboro North Carolina, where <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre" target="_blank">Klansmen assassinated five members of the Communist Workers Party</a> in 1979 at a "death to the Klan" rally.<br />
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Above I've summarized just a small amount of the content of <i>We Will Shoot Back</i>. I strongly recommend reading the entire book. I suspect most readers will find their understanding of the civil rights movement transformed. The image painted of Black activists willing to use force if necessary to protect themselves and advance their movement is quite different from the way the civil rights movement is usually portrayed. It is not that images of disciplined non-violent activists not being provoked by beatings, or communities singing in churches are wrong. Rather, these practices should be seen as part of the same movement that at times provided armed guards to movement activists and shot back at nightriders. Attempts to disentangle an early, good, noble, non-violent movement from a later bad, nationalist, violent movement are a lot harder to do after reading this book. Apart from the chapter on the RNA, one of the most striking things is how consistently the protests described, protests which involved armed self-defense, were advancing demands that involved rudimentary reforms necessary to abolish segregation--firing the most racist police, attaining a minimal level of respect from city governments, ending the refusal of white businesses to hire African Americans. The RNA is something of an outlier, but for the most part, armed resistance was advancing basic goals of the civil rights movement. It is also important to note that movement activity of this sort persisted long after the civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-nineteen sixties. Jim Crow was not simply abolished by legislative fiat in Washington, but through a multitude of hard fought struggles in small cities all over the South.Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-108177667847261702014-01-20T04:25:00.000-08:002014-01-20T09:38:24.765-08:00Past and future of Multiracial Coalitions--Some Thoughts on Power to the Poor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9MyggqPeA2qAg-pOZ3qSdV9UovLQq4DpTUWzurR9dCcI9TRKxxFbLhwZ_CrSM3NAgNLj-MT7Y1TVi86jPFchFtwq-Ym1WFSM-g5jnO3FSi6luO1oyXJnFt_BOplFFPEA2rpxvygU0vpI-/s1600/power+to+the+poor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9MyggqPeA2qAg-pOZ3qSdV9UovLQq4DpTUWzurR9dCcI9TRKxxFbLhwZ_CrSM3NAgNLj-MT7Y1TVi86jPFchFtwq-Ym1WFSM-g5jnO3FSi6luO1oyXJnFt_BOplFFPEA2rpxvygU0vpI-/s1600/power+to+the+poor.jpg" height="320" width="221" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the last few years, our understanding of the social movements of the sixties has been transformed by new scholarship that looks beyond familiar narratives of SDS and the civil rights movement in the South. Works like Penny Lewis’ </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100395380" target="_blank">Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Amy Sonnie and James Tracy’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.mhpbooks.com/books/hillbilly-nationalists-urban-race-rebels-and-black-power/" target="_blank">Hillibilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.mhpbooks.com/books/hillbilly-nationalists-urban-race-rebels-and-black-power/" target="_blank"> </a>and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269224" target="_blank">The Black Revolution on Campus</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Martha Biondi have undermined notions that the movements in the sixties were largely bereft of class politics, or that identity was foregrounded in ways that marginalized economic struggles. In fact, identity and economic struggle were combined in innovative ways by groups not well represented by the existing labor movement. Not preserved in an amber of nostalgia like some highpoints of struggle, these struggles were nonetheless highly significant. The fact that they cannot be glibly classified as victories may in fact make them even more useful to understanding struggles in the present. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-9320.html" target="_blank">Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974</a> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by historian Gordon K. Mantler is a worthy addition to this literature. Focused on efforts to build multiracial alliances, mostly between African Americans and Mexican Americans, it highlights a number of these struggles, showing how assertions of identity, multiracial coalitions, and economic struggles could, for a time, all build together, rather than at the expense of each other. </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-79844842-a5b0-9e29-9b45-4d27c1c4c935" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The notion of multiracial coalitions, or “rainbow coalitions,” can seem natural, or a “no-brainer.” Until recently, the American polity largely excluded non-whites, and, to this day, whites constitute a large majority of the most privileged groups. On the other hand, less privileged, powerful and wealthy groups are also disproportionately non-white. Furthermore, whites are often racist against all those who do not look like them. At the same time, the position of poorer whites could conceivably be strenghthened through an alliance with people of color. However, the author identifies three concrete challenges to the scenario of inevitable multiracial coalitions. First, the history of different racial groups is quite varied, leading to different priorities in the present. Secondly, the evolution of struggle in the US led to an activist hierarchy in which African American leaders saw themselves as the leaders of all oppressed, sometimes folding other groups priorities into their own. Finally, the racial hierarchy in the US is not simply white and non-white. Racism against African Americans is more sharply posed, and other groups have sometimes acted to distance themselves from African Americans, in effect, asserting that they are not so far from whites. All of these emerged as concrete problems in efforts to build coalitions between African Americans and Mexican Americans. On the other hand, continued violence at the hands of police was a shared experience that facilitated unification.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When the book begins its narrative in the late fifties, struggles for economic justice are at a low ebb. Cold war red baiting pushed African American civil rights leaders to focus primarily on the need to dismantle Jim Crow in the South, rather than a broader agenda aimed at the more informal discrimination that constrained African Americans all over the country, let alone broader questions about the organization of the entire American political economy. A similar situation obtained in Mexican American organizations. In both cases, dread of being called communists pushed movements towards demands that liberals would be relatively comfortable with, while a broader rhetorical attack was taken off the table. However, as the movements began to grow in confidence, and to some degree encouraged by the labor movement, they began to reassert economic demands.This occurred even as civil rights legislation proposed at the federal focused largely on removing formal discrimination, rather than fully desegregating the labor and housing markets. The culmination of this phase was the March on Washington for Freedom and Economic Justice in 1963. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like the early phase of the civil rights movement in general, the March and King’s dream speech have been incorporated into the consensus model of US history, where institutions bend just enough to incorporate legitimate demands. But in its day, the march occupied an uncertain space, endorsed by some Democratic politicians, but viewed by the media and the Kennedy administration with alarm. Marches on Washington were not the standard protest tactic they later became, and a lot of coverage focused on prospects of violence. Although the rally was peaceful, “the issues of jobs, economic freedom and poverty dominated the days program often through “tough, even harsh rhetoric.” (quoting the New York Times report at the time).” Notwithstanding the quote from the Times, the economic message was largely disappeared from reports on the march. Women were involved with encouraging and planning the march, but mostly excluded from the stage. To the extent that they attended, Mexican Americans did so as individuals or trade union members, since a Black-Brown alliance was not really yet on the agenda. In fact, one of the more conservative Mexican American organizations actually denounced the march, seeking to distance itself from the civil rights movement.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The two mightiest advocates of non-violence in their respective communities--Martin Luther King Jr and Cesar Chavez--never met. Chavez had more success building alliances with the predominantly white student movement than with African American civil rights organizations and placed his emphasis there. In general, Chavez does not loom large in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Power to the Poor</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as his focus on union organizing among farmworkers did not lend itself to a radical critique that would open up to broader alliances. Although the farm workers were allied with SNCC, it was whites in SNCC, increasingly isolated in a climate of Black nationalism, who provided the key linkages. For his part, King was skeptical of labor unions and their struggles for some time. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">King’s Chicago campaign, initiated in 1966, intended to bring the civil rights movement to the north. But it faced significant difficulties, notably Mayor Daley’s political machine and the hostility of working class whites. King wound up with a feeble agreement about open housing with Daley, who failed to implement it. Interestingly, King became open to seeing gang members as potential allies, an orientation much more associated with the Black Panthers than King. In the context of the Chicago campaign, the King-led SCLC first reached out to Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, both because of their proximity to black neighborhoods and the need for allies for the struggling campaign. The alliance was weak, however. This remained the case even as Puerto Ricans mobilized against police brutality and murder. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is with the growing prominence of the Black Power movement and the anti-war movement that the push for multiracial coalitions begins in earnest. The identity basis of the former did not undermine the prospect of multiracial coalitions. Instead, its emphasis on white supremacy as the enemy led it towards an inclusive attitude towards other non-white oppressed groups, among them Mexican American Reies Tijerina Lopez’s land grant activism, which documented the theft of land by whites in the 1840s and called for redress, eventually moving towards a direct action approach. Another important activist was Corky Gonzalez, radicalized in the context of the War on Poverty and moving towards an anti-war stance. Both the Vietnam war and oppression by the police were unifying experiences for racial minorities at this time. Black Power spurred the assertiveness of other minorities in the context of multiracial coalitions. When African Americans succeeded in demanding fifty percent of representation at the first (and last) National Conference for New Politics in 1967, many white activists present were aghast, while some Mexican Americans were impressed by the discipline and power of the African Americans, and wished to emulate them. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Amidst growing radicalization, King introduced the idea for the Poor People’s Campaign which would unify poor people across divides of race and ethnicity, hoping to at least win a guaranteed income or universal employment legislation. But the experience of multiracial coalitions was so limited that it was a real struggle for SCLC to identify non-Black activists and organizations to reach out to. An additional concern was recruiting actual poor people, rather than simply organizers. Problems of paternalism towards non-Black groups and women persisted although the campaign would ultimately highlight the struggles of both. King accepted the push for a guaranteed income from welfare rights activists, but this alienated labor unions who were focused on wage labor. In March 1968, in Atlanta, eighty plus representatives of non-black poor met in Atlanta for the Minority Group Conference, “the most unheralded triumph of King’s last weeks and the Poor People’s Campaign in general.” The group included Mexican Americans, Native Americans, representatives of poor whites in Appalachia. In his speech to the group, King raised the demand for land along with more familiar demands around poverty, discrimination and ending the war, binding his cause to that of Mexican Americans and Native Americans. King’s embrace of the guaranteed income and land causes illustrates the way coalition work creates the opportunities for movement leaders to learn and expand their vision. Still, it was difficult for SCLC to loosen the reins of the campaign they had started. The campaign showed some promise, but also struggled to move forward. King’s decision to go to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers generated tensions in the SCLC as it was feared resources were being diverted from the Poor People’s Campaign. Furthermore, a major demonstration in Memphis turned violent as youth ripped the signs off sticks and used them to smash store windows. The negative publicity generated was used to tar the Poor People’s Campaign, and King considered calling it off. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The assassination of King in Memphis threatened to derail the campaign, but, in fact, allies rallied to the cause in its wake. Even some of those who had rejected non-violence by this point lent their support. “I felt that as my personal tribute to Dr. King that I would go ahead and do it” said Lauren Watson, a Black Panther from Denver. Continuing the work King had begun in Chicago, SCLC recruited street gangs into the campaign. With notable exceptions, after the assassination enthusiasm for the campaign increased among non-Black organizers. Media criticism was momentarily tempered. On the other hand, over 75 bills were introduced into congress to block the campaign. Although King believed the specifics of demands should remain vague, after his death, organizers began to canvas organizations for demands, eventually producing a forty-nine page document enumerating them. A committee of 100--one third steering committee members, two thirds poor people--arrived in Washington, delivering testimony to members of the liberal establishment, garnering positive attention, and ultimately providing “the high water mark of racial unity” of the campaign. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Caravans to Washington to participate generated more publicity, but often reinforced stereotypical understandings. In particular, a mule train with fifteen mule driven wagons to demonstrate abject poverty in Mississippi garnered considerable interest. “The Eastern and Midwestern caravans, with their more diverse, urban constituencies, received far less attention.” The caravans themselves, particularly the Western one, were crucial sites for the development of multiracial coalitions. They were also sites where resentments and tensions among coalition partners surfaced. For example, Mexican Americans and Native Americans sometimes felt like their concerns were being pushed to the margins. When the Western caravan arrived, its members took up residence in the Hawthorne School, a liberal private school, rather than at Resurrection City, the encampment on the national mall. At the Hawthorne School, a more multicultural community emerged, and the most effective protests of the campaign were launched. Not only Mexican Americans, but also whites, African Americans from the West and Native Americans camped there. The facility was not segregated along racial lines, rather between single men and families. Unlike at Resurrection City, run bureaucratically by SCLC, women took the lead in preparing meals and organizing the space at Hawthorne, successfully producing community. The presence of poor whites helped dispel an analysis of poverty based on race, and instead encouraged a focus on capitalism. Violent repression of protests launched by this community, particularly a sit in at the Supreme Court focused on Indian fishing rights, drew people together. Among other things, the protest was also an assertion of the importance of the agenda of groups besides African Americans. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile at Resurrection City, the population became more homogeneously African American, signifying an equation between African Americans and poverty campaign organizers had sought to dispel. Although imagined as an orderly micro-city, it proved difficult to live up to this plan in reality. A great deal of rain did not help. Jesse Jackson was charged with administering the city, but he was inexperienced in this sort of work. To turn attention away from the disorder of Resurrection City, SCLC played up Ralph Abernathy as the new civil rights leader, undermining the multicultural character of the campaign, and unintentionally calling attention to the absence of King, since Abernathy was no match as a charismatic leader. At the same time, Resurrection City became a community of sorts, and hosted a number of prominent entertainers, as well as efforts like the Many Races Soul Center and the Poor People’s University. According to Mantler, many poor participants found the whole experience very empowering.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The poor people’s campaign had a bigger impact on individual participants than on structures of power or even movement organizations. It created a bigger stage, and more multicultural community, for people to interact in, enhancing the confidence of Mexican American participants, among others. Interactions at the Hawthorne School clarified parallels between the experiences of poor communities of different races. The campaign led to the marginalization of Reies Tijerina’s campaign for land, and a higher profile for Corky Gonzalez’ urban orientation, and the multiracial coalitions that lent itself to. Demonstrations that had a limited impact on the wider world at times had a powerful impact on participants, expanding people’s imagination of the possible. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Familiar tensions reared up around Solidarity Day, the largest march organized by the campaign. Bayard Rustin, a media favorite and key organizer of the earlier March on Washington, had to resign as organizer because his political sensibility was now out of touch with the bulk of activists. For example, he resisted calling for an end to the Vietnam War. But his replacement, the National Urban League’s Sterling Tucker, failed to include Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and welfare rights activists on the original list of speakers. They did, however, assert themselves and get on to the program, as did women. In both respects, more radical demands and more diverse speakers, this marked a departure from the 1963 march. According to the Mantler, it was women’s speeches that stole the show. The media mostly negatively compared the smaller Solidarity Day to the earlier march. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Amidst media hype about alleged violence among participants, Resurrection City’s permit was not extended. Although police repression of the camp was met by civil disobedience, participation was limited with only 250 people arrested. The Hawthorne school failed to comply with city demands that it expel its guests, and demonstrations were, for a time, launched from there. A few efforts were made to create local resurrection cities elsewhere in the country without much success. Direct political results of the campaign included modest improvements in hunger policies, but nothing resembling the lofty talk with which it had been launched. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the campaign, more multiracial coalitions were created, often fueled by participants in the Poor People’s Campaign. However, a more durable practice and belief was that the power base of each group must be strengthened to make the impact desired. In general, the campaign energized the Mexican American movement, which moved in a more cultural nationalist direction. Corky Gonzalez concluded that “Chicano strength relied on ethnic and racial unity and that, although poverty and oppression were shared by many people, blacks, Mexican Americans, and Indians defined justice differently.” When his organization took on questions of education, demands for greater attention to Mexican American history were not broadened to include African Americans. Furthermore, his organization opposed school desegregation because they did not want Chicano students bussed out of their neighborhoods. Although the connections made during the poor people’s campaign fueled the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, in the final document, masculine, nationalist rhetoric marginalized possible grounds for multiracial coalitions. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For their part, among Black people there was a growing sense that African American identity was more powerful at unifying people than experiences of poverty. Surging Black nationalism helped elect more Black officeholders; it also reduced the focus on multiracial coalitions. The poor people’s campaign empowered women to speak up, but more in the context of African American struggle than in a general poor people’s movement. Throughout the campaign, the National Welfare Rights Organization had succeeded in staying focused on their issues, expanding the agenda of civil rights organizations. In practice, the NWRO was an overwhelmingly African American organization. Mexican American members, unable to impress upon the leadership the importance of language and citizenship status for understanding different experiences of welfare, went on to form the Chicano Welfare Rights Organization. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the Poor People’s Campaign wrapped up, SCLC was unable to regain the stature it had before King was assassinated. Protests at the major political conventions made little impact. In Chicago, the Mule Train was again assembled, and anti-war protesters huddled behind it as they approached the convention center. However, the police waited for the mules to pass before unleashing violence against the anti-war protesters, ironically signalling the declining significance of SCLC. SCLC had some success refocusing on labor struggles in the South, including one at a hospital in Charleston South Carolina. The campaign highlighted both a labor-civil rights coalition, and a mostly female workforce, themes that would be more significant to labor over the next few decades. The struggle both accelerated organizing at hospitals nationwide, and empowered the Black community in Charleston beyond the workplace. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, played an important role, fusing civil rights concerns and a gender analysis. However, SCLC continued on under Abernathy, rather than opening itself to leadership by women. A weakened SCLC was no longer able to generate coalition partners among Mexican Americans and welfare rights organizations who did not see any urgency in allying with this organization. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jesse Jackson emerged from the Poor People’s Campaign with his reputation strengthened, catapulting from being “a mildly effective local leader in Chicago to a national civil rights star.” Jackson returned to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, which sought to expand private-sector employment for African Americans. The organization pressured retailers to hire more African Americans. Breadbasket had some success pressuring the Illinois legislature and governor around poverty related issues. A potential alliance with the UFW around the grape boycott, however, proved difficult. The boycott was mostly supported in Chicago by progressive white organizations and Chicano organizations. Breadbaskets priorities of increasing private sector jobs for African Americans were very different from the UFW’s. Indeed, supporting the grape boycott would have voided agreements Breadbasket had made with some employers such as retail stores. Jackson showed little enthusiasm for a campaign he had not launched himself. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jackson had more success increasing the power of African Americans in relation to the Daley machine, more so on the south side than in the poorest neighborhoods of the west side, where some regarded him as simply the new Booker T. Washington and set about building their own organizations, most notably the Black Panthers under Fred Hampton. A Rainbow Coalition between Black Panthers, Young Patriots (a white group) and the Young Lords was active throughout 1969 trying to shift power from the Daley machine to “all power to the people.” The Panthers’ Rainbow Coalition reminded some of the Poor People’s Campaign. Yet that coalition proved thin and unstable. Again problems of different priorities surfaced, as Latinos were more concerned than African Americans about the threat of urban renewal. Furthermore, there was intense harassment from the police, culminating in the killing of Hampton. Although at first this triggered renewed commitment to the coalition, it ultimately further weakened it. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jesse Jackson emerged stronger, and flirted with a bid for mayor, but ultimately did not follow up. Tensions increased between Jackson and the SCLC leadership of Abernathy, frustrated that Jackson only focused on his base in Chicago rather than going nationwide. Ultimately, this led to a split, further weakening SCLC, with Jackson renaming his organization PUSH. Unlike Abernathy, Jackson participated in the National Black Political Convention in 1972, a tremendous show of unity among black elected officials and other luminaries, but one which also continued the drift away from multiracial coalitions. The idea of a third party was repudiated. Instead, there was focus on reforming the Democratic Party, leading to the famously diverse convention of 1972. “By achieving this, African Americans ensured that a multiracial fight against poverty would not be abandoned completely in the years to come.”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the conclusion, the author notes some of the benefits that came from much maligned identity politics, including greater political voice for African Americans and Mexican Americans. Most importantly, he notes that “distinct identities were--and still are--inherent to the concept of coalition, antipoverty or otherwise.” The identity based movements were able to launch multiracial electoral campaigns in the 70s and 80s, such as that of Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago. On the other hand, such electoral movements have not been able to reverse the direction of US politics. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For me, the chapters on the Poor People’s Campaign resonated most powerfully. As an effort to revitalize a movement through an encampment, it bears a striking resemblance, with marked differences, to Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street set up an encampment in New York City, the financial capital of the US, away from the center of government that activists mostly believed had completely failed them. The Poor People’s Campaign set up on the mall in Washington DC, signifying a still existing, if fraying relationship with liberals within the federal government. Occupy Wall Street was an attempt to enact horizontalism, while the encampment of the Poor People’s Campaign was run in a top down fashion by SCLC. Occupy Wall Street struggled to affirm that it was not only for White people, while the Poor People’s Campaign struggled with an image that it was only for African Americans. Neither of these images was entirely fair, although there was some truth to them, particularly in describing the people at the core of the encampments. Although “What is our one demand?” was an early slogan of OWS, no demands were ever formalized. The Poor People’s Campaign had forty-nine pages of demands, with five thematic areas. Yet in both cases, there were accusations in the media that the protests were too unfocused, although in retrospect it is hard to see what the problem was in either case. Perhaps most crucially, OWS did spark the hoped for movement, generating over a thousand Occupy groups nationwide and large, exuberant protests in major cities. The Poor People’s Campaign, put simply, did not, and plans to follow up with campaigns in forty cities were scaled back. This probably had to do with changing times, and constituencies. The Poor People’s Campaign came near the end of a period of liberal inclusiveness, where the federal government tried to manage the expansion of consumer society. In other words, it spoke for those still left out. OWS spoke for a middle class terrified that the social contract it anticipated had been destroyed, as decades of neoliberalism seems to have produced little more than an expanding class of debtors. On the other hand, Occupy vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, leaving a slogan (“We are the 99%!”), loose networks, and many memories. Although the Poor People’s Campaign seems to have been a more obvious failure, it also produced memories that helped push activists along later. The success or failure of social movements is rarely as self-evident as the score of a football game.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As noted earlier, the movements described in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Power to the Poor</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> do not lend themselves to the misty fog of nostalgia that envelops movements of the sixties. Readers may also find the dichotomies that often organize thinking about movements eroded. For example, Martin Luther King, the paragon of nonviolence, was increasingly curious about how to relate to street gangs, a direction of inquiry more associated with the Black Panthers. On the other hand, some Black Panthers participated in the Poor People’s Campaign. The division between economic and identity oriented struggles, a division which generates endless amounts of hand-wringing among the contemporary left, looks blurry in historical perspective. In their heyday, these movements were both assertions of identity and challenges to economic power. Finally, a binary opposition between successful and failed movements is also difficult to sustain. The March on Washington in 1963 is often held up in amber as a perfect moment, but it is worth highlighting that the economic concerns organizers hoped to highlight were marginalized. The Poor People’s Campaign, if it is spoken about at all, is often referred to as indicating the increasing difficulty of the civil rights movement to find its footing in the late sixties. But it also constituted something of a breakthrough, however imperfect, in the construction of multiracial coalitions, and left a powerful impact on participants. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If one were to bring the story of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Power to the Poor</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> up to date, I think three developments would loom large: the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, the L.A. riots of 1992, and the US Social Forums in 2007 and 2010. Although very different in character, each brought together people from multiple races and highlighted issues of poverty and inequality. Furthermore, each was centered in African American initiatives--Jackson, who made the phrase “rainbow coalition” a feature of American life, was a leader who attempted to bridge the gap between civil rights and black power. The L.A. riots erupted in response to the verdict in the trial of police officers who had beaten Rodney King, but soon substantial numbers of Latinos and whites were participating as well. The largely unheralded US Social Forum was rooted in community groups, often with roots among African Americans, and has held meetings in Detroit and Atlanta, an implicit rebuke of bastions of predominantly white progressivism like Boston and the Bay Area. It revived the multiracial coalition of the Poor People’s Campaign, and, equally importantly, revived the imperative of including participation from poor people, making for a fairly stark contrast with other gatherings of the US left. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the last decade or so, the most prominent mobilizations have been the anti-war protests, associated with left parties and made up of predominantly white participants, the immigrants rights movement, largely Latino, and OWS, associated with anarchist tendencies that also draw mostly white people. Emergent movements of low wage workers and against “The New Jim Crow” have a lot of potential to revive the multiracial coalitions. After all, low wage workers constitute a rainbow of people. While “the New Jim Crow” draws its reference from racism against African Americans, just in the last year, there have been protests against police murders of Latinos in Anaheim, Santa Rosa, and Durham, a white homeless man in Fullerton, and the death of a white gay man in custody in New Haven. Oppression by the police remains a unifying experience across Black-Brown racial lines, and now one might also expect Muslims to join such a coalition, as well as greater awareness of police harassment of gender non-conformists. T</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">he Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, a challenge to the dominance of the state government by the far right, led by the NAACP but channelling a variety of demands, might also be mentioned. The question of multiracial coalitions remains critical in a country where class and racial divisions still overlap a great deal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-86339169575671005612014-01-10T15:52:00.000-08:002014-01-10T15:52:47.000-08:00My 2013 Top Ten Books<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_JTMgl9pU9a3zaF9HFFkj76uGF9Uo_EaZdR09U9qYoq9xz_xP48BfyoBVsnSBLfIR9WqJe2airdwQyf01EnbvqxBvo8TYnIwM-jG8w3LJvsjUxKWLpg-XDdBS47Ny7ZZjXIPod-9dnkgN/s1600/covertcapital.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_JTMgl9pU9a3zaF9HFFkj76uGF9Uo_EaZdR09U9qYoq9xz_xP48BfyoBVsnSBLfIR9WqJe2airdwQyf01EnbvqxBvo8TYnIwM-jG8w3LJvsjUxKWLpg-XDdBS47Ny7ZZjXIPod-9dnkgN/s1600/covertcapital.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don’t trust “best books of the year.” Nobody really has the time to assess more than a tiny portion of the titles actually published. My own tastes run towards academic historical work, but I recommend these ten books to anyone curious about changing the world and interested in learning more about oppressive structures and efforts to change them. A few were published before 2013, but all were published in the last couple of years.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/translating-anarchy" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Mark Bray</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Part ethnographic research on Occupy, part insider account of how things worked at Zuccotti, part sprinkling of the author’s thoughts on various topics like capitalism and anarchist strategy (better on the latter than the former), this book provides strong evidence for its thesis--that, at heart, Occupy was an anarchist movement that deliberately toned down its rhetoric so as to appeal to a much larger community.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-1d5c92db-7e72-cb16-da5c-cc75bb6b1969" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520274655" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of the U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--Andrew Friedman </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mixing biographical vignettes, architecture criticism, and post-colonial history, Friedman illuminates the way Northern Virginia, home of the C.I.A., numerous private contractors, and more, has been critical to U.S. imperialism, and vice versa. Particularly vivid rendering of the evacuation of Saigon, which you may think has nothing much to do with Northern Virginia, but you would be wrong. Among other things, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the general executing a man during the Tet Offensive in </span><a href="http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/how-to/icons-of-photography/535352/saigon-execution-by-eddie-adam-s-iconic-photograph" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one of the most famous photos from the Vietnam war</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, opened a pizza shop there.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-9320.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economc Justice, 1960-1974</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--Gordon K. Mantler </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Recovers the history of multi-racial coalitions as they developed during the sixties. Particularly memorable for its chapters on the Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King’s last effort, an encampment in Washington D.C. that came to fruition just months after his assassination. Although remembered as a failure, Mantler shows the way it was a step forward in the construction of multi-racial coalitions, and also as a way to draw attention to a number of group’s causes. The largest demonstration of the campaign, the Solidarity Day March, compared favorably with the larger and much better known March on Washington in 1963 in terms of radicalism of message, diversity of speakers and inclusion of women. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/regional-history-after-1500/patterns-empire-british-and-american-empires-1688-present" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--Julian Go </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Debunks the idea that the US is exceptional for its failure to exercise its power in the form of empire building. By closely comparing the US to Great Britain, Go shows how the forms of rule exercised by both states are virtually identical, varying in their application mostly because of changes in the global context. For example, while it is often said that the US exercises power indirectly while Britain formally subordinated colonies, Go reminds readers that the US had, and continues to have colonies, while Britain at times ruled indirectly, either using native elites to run colonies, or exercising decisive influence over formally sovereign states.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1020-carbon-democracy" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--Timothy Mitchell </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ambitious book that maps the history of workers’ power, democracy, and decolonization on to the transition from coal as the major source of fuel to oil. In a nutshell, coal production and usage actually facilitated democracy and workers’ power, which were undermined by the move to oil. What’s next?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269224" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Black Revolution on Campus</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--Martha Biondi Did you know that in 1969, historically Black A&T university in North Carolina was subject to a “”combined ground and air offensive” ...featuring six hundred National Guardsmen, a tank, several armed personnel carriers, (and) an airplane and a helicopter”? No? Perhaps, like me, your understanding of the campus revolts of the sixties is mostly limited to predominantly white campuses. This book is a good place to start to fix that. It also explores the Black revolts on predominantly White campuses, and the movement for Black Studies. Like the Mantler book above, it leaves little standing of the myth that the identity-based movements of the sixties ignored economic issues.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/We-Created-Chavez/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by George Ciccariello-Maher--Focused on the evolving relationship between the revolutionary left in Venezuela and the people, culminating in two great moments--the Caracazo riots of 1989 and the reversal of the coup in 2003--one hopes this book will lay to rest racist myths of Chavez as caudillo holding the Venezuelan masses in thrall. Instead, Chavez is here portrayed as a product of an upsurge in struggle, yet not the limit of that struggle. This book could conceivably lead to a more fruitful dialogue between Marxists and anarchists.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674045552" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--Walter Johnson </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Incredibly rich description of the slave system in the Mississippi valley, the heart of American capitalism in the decades before the Civil War. Johnson describes everything from the dogs used to chase slaves to the financial transactions that underpinned steam ships. He ends with chapters describing the adventures of those who tried to expand the system to Nicaragua and Cuba. Essential American history.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072992" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Mark S. Mizruchi </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In response to a new climate at the end of WWII, with labor unions strong and assertive, a corporate elite consolidated committed to proposing solutions to the nation’s problems. For the most part, the policies it advocated for were to the left of what has been on offer from the Obama administration. Then the economic climate worsened in the seventies, and the corporate elite moved to the right, and successfully smashed its two constraints--labor unions and state regulators. Having triumphed, the elite fractured, and the US has drifted to the right ever since, unconstrained by either popular forces or a corporate elite that can see beyond its next tax break.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100395380" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Movement as Myth and Memory</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Penny Lewis </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another new perspective on the sixties, here dispelling the persistent notion that the anti-war movement consisted of students at elite colleges. Instead, Lewis highlights anti-war activity like rebellions of GIs, the anti-war aspect of African American and Chicano nationalism, and even anti-war activity in unions.</span></div>
Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-38553856991518241752013-10-31T16:42:00.000-07:002013-10-31T17:29:22.431-07:00Lou Reed, Israel, and Backlash Politics<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some people on the left will always find something to complain about, and, in the case of Lou Reed, the recently deceased founder of the Velvet Underground, it is the support for Israel expressed in the song "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qe76gkCxo">Good Evening Mr. Waldheim</a>." The specific lyrics are "<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;">Jesse you say common ground/ </span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Does that include the P.L.O?/ </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">What about people right here, right now/ </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Who fought for you not so long ago?" Jesse refers to Jesse Jackson, who had run for president in the Democratic primaries in 1984 and 1988, just before "New York," the album including "Good Evening Mr. Waldheim" was released (in other words, the song was not very timely, as the Democratic primaries had already run their course, and Jackson would never again play as prominent a role in American life). "the people.. who fought for you not so long ago" refers to Jews who participated in the civil rights movement, as Reed goes on to sing "remember those civil rights workers buried in the ground." The song ends on an even more condescending note: "</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">And Jesse you're inside my thoughts/</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">As the rhythmic words subside/</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">My common ground invites you in/</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Or do you prefer to wait outside?"</span><span style="font-family: proxnov-reg, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;"> It's a terrible song, and mostly reveals that Lou Reed should have stayed away from politics, which he did nearly his entire career. No point celebrating his engagement with a typical bunch of causes appealing to liberal artists, or his anti-American misanthropy (another standard liberal trope), as John Nichols <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/176852/lou-reeds-more-perfect-union-politics">does</a>. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Reed was distinguished by writing about the demimonde he encountered in New York in a decidely private, apolitical manner. Based on their lyrical content, you would be hard pressed to realize that the four great Velvet Underground records were produced during the largest upsurge of protest in the US since the thirties (although there is that reference to "all you protest kids" in "Sweet Jane"). I remember reading somewhere that the Velvets played once with that other great proto-punk band, the MC5, universally regarded as far more political, and were horrified when the MC5's lead singer encouraged the crowd to rip the club up in the spirit of "tear the system down." Reed apparently got out on stage and said he appreciated the club and its owner for letting them play. This story reflects well on Reed, in my opinion.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Notwithstanding that "Good Evening Mr. Waldheim" is something of an outlier in Reed's career, I find it strangely fascinating. It does capture something about the mood among Jewish liberals following the sixties. It is not only a question of supporting Israel. At least as important is that Israel provides the context for Reed to disdain Jesse Jackson, as does Louis Farrakhan, elsewhere in the song. The moral structure of the song is an unintentional travesty of the guilt tripping often ascribed to Jewish parents--after all I've done for you ("remember those civil rights workers..."), you go and do this (talk to Arafat). He seems puzzled and angry that Jesse won't follow HIS lead: "My common ground invites you in.." There is another Reed song that references similar themes. In "I Wanna be Black," a parody of white hipster's racial aspirations, he declares that one of the things he could do if his race were different is "fuck up the Jews." Here again, African American perceptions of Jews are imagined as alienating and divisive (I suspect the reference here is to tensions epitomized by <a href="http://takingnote.tcf.org/2008/09/ocean-hill-brow.html">the antisemitic poem</a> read on the radio during the Brownsville Ocean Hill teachers' strike).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">The outlook Reed delineates here was shared by a generation of liberal Jews. Those who gravitated to the far left did not share it, but they were a small minority. The bigger picture is something like this. In the fifties and sixties, Israel was seen as a good liberal cause among American Jews (and even many others on the left). It was not that a big a deal for wider American politics. Jewish life in Israel had socialist overtones--think of the Kibbutz. There was no significant challenge to this perspective within the United States. Jews then, as now, were heavily represented in the liberal professions (teachers, social workers, social scientists) and the worldview fostered fit well with the expansion of New Deal/Great Society programs.Liberal Jews also supported the civil rights movement. Jews know what is it like to be an oppressed minority. Jews simply wanted all the doors of American society to be open to everybody, so talent could thrive (the Jews most directly involved in the civil rights movement may have seen things differently, since they often had a far left background). Then, in 1967, Israel triumphed militarily over its neighbors. This heightened a nationalist identification with Israel among American Jews. Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, the world left turned decisively against Israel, and support for the cause of Palestine self determination became increasingly prominent. This alone was baffling for many American Jewish liberals, who had no idea why people might have problems with Israel. The explanation was to mash Yassir Arafat, Adolf Hitler, the Arab public, Third World leftists into a sort of ur Anti-Semitism that is continually reinvented (hence, Kurt Waldheim's inclusion in the song). Add to this the equation of the Soviet Union with anti-semitism, and we can begin to see how US power would be embraced as the last best hope for Jews in the world. Domestically, liberalism was also in crisis. The aforementioned teachers' strike epitomized liberal Jews declining ability to play a role as a senior partner to African Americans. Riots were sometimes perceived as targeting Jewish businesses in African American neighborhoods. The growing crisis of urban America was often portrayed as one in which African Americans had betrayed their alliance with liberal Jews, although, really, liberal Jews didn't show as much sympathy for concerns more oriented towards self determination, political power and economic struggles that characterized the late sixties and seventies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">This is a forgotten element of the backlash politics of the seventies and eighties. It is far more widely discussed that corporate America organized itself to destroy union and government regulatory power, that whites in the South moved into the Republican column, that working class whites in the North feared competition from African Americans or school integration, and that evangelical christianity reawakened as a political force allied with right wing Republicans. But the crisis of liberalism--and Jews then (to some extent, still) were a disproportionate, even leading element of American liberals--is often forgotten. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Today, these politics mostly seem like ancient history. The torch at Dissent has passed from the likes of Michael Walzer, who would probably agree with "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim," to a younger generation, that, at a minimum, would be highly critical of Israel. It's been over ten years since Stephen Malkmus, an heir to Reed if ever there was one, sang "my Palestinian nephew got his face blown off in a dusty craft." As third world radicalism and Black nationalism have receded, so has paranoia over them. Given the greater prominence of Arab Americans, it's gotten a lot harder for college educated Americans, Jewish or not, to never learn how others see Israel.The turn to neoconservatism by some after 9-11 was less profound and intense than the earlier shift described above. The Nation still prints the rants of Eric Alterman, but they lack the heft of similar stuff written by Paul Berman in the 1980s. On the downside, neoliberal/neoconservative principles are now so entrenched in the US that it is not clear they require a living ideology to reproduce themselves.</span></span></div>
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Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-10402820475346518712013-10-27T19:27:00.003-07:002013-10-27T19:27:45.820-07:00The Coming Crisis of the Democratic Party?I had a recent exchange with a friend on Facebook. I suggested that if the left were to learn any lesson from the Tea Party, it is that capital's control of the major parties is more precarious than it seems, and that primaries can be used to challenge the rule of the centrists. Hence the left might want to explore Democratic primaries. My friend retorted that the Democratic Party is more insulated from democratic pressure than the Republicans, as a result of things like superdelegates. I suspect both I and my friend may have legitimate points, and I wonder how things will play out in the next ten years.<br />
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The last time there were major social movements on the left, in the late sixties, there was eventual movement into electoral politics, culminating with the McGovern candidacy for president. Although he was less than ideal by left standards (so what else is new), McGovern epitomized the concerns of the movements. Above all I am referring to the peace movement, but the convention that nominated him, filled with a new generation including more African Americans and women, fed the perception that he was the candidate of the movements in general. Although he had an excellent voting record on labor issues, the unions (at this point still relatively powerful) basically abandoned him, and it may well have been the case that the union leadership was more or less in touch with the sentiment of their membership in doing so. McGovern lost in a landslide. The Democrats quickly created the superdelegates to frustrate any future prospect of nominating a candidate perceived as too far left for the American public. It is undoubtedly the case that some of the politicos responsible for this also didn't want a Democratic party too far left.<br />
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Although the creation of the superdelegates was a significant development, the trauma of the McGovern defeat was more significant as the Democrats drifted rightward. The super delegates played a significant role once, in nominating Walter Mondale rather than Gary Hart, as Gary Hart will remind anyone willing to listen. But I don't remember passions being all that high during the 1984 primaries in any case (or rather, the passion was among the minority who rallied behind Jesse Jackson), and Hart, likely as not, would have also lost to Reagan. All Democratic politicians who came of age in the seventies learned the same lesson from McGovern, and that lesson was to not tack too far to the left lest you offend the voting public. Even so, McGovern has been constantly invoked as the spectre haunting the party. Bill Clinton learned the lesson, and consolidated the Democrats move to the right.<br />
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Jump forward to the present. We appear to be on the cusp of a renewed era of social activism, epitomized to date by Occupy, rebellions at the state level (Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas) and audacious working class action--Chicago Teachers, Fast Food and Walmart workers. A number of other movements--around education, climate change, anti-racism, and feminism, are either springing to life or reawakening. I suspect this will all probably deepen and intensify in the next few years, and economic justice will provide the fulcrum, much as anti-war and civil rights did in the sixties. Already it is having some electoral effects. Senator Elizabeth Warren is one example. Likely winner of the upcoming mayoral election in New York City, Bill de Blasio is another. Soon enough--in 2020, if not 2016--this spirit will turn into a presidential primary challenge. The Democratic party constituencies are being scrambled. Organized labor is weaker than ever, and many white workers continue to be peeled off by the Republicans. On the other hand, Occupy was the most dramatic moment to date in the refocusing of the energies of the college educated middle class on economic issues as opposed to the social cultural issues that have dominated the landscape for some time. The material basis for this is the growing anxiety over health insurance, student debt, and jobs.<br />
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Such a primary challenge would be infuriating to the centrists who dominate the party, and whose bread and butter is propitiating Wall Street. What if it looked like the challenger was going to be the likely nominee? Would they use super delegates to deny him or her victory? As noted above, the super delegates were only instituted after the McGovern debacle of 1972, when much of the young generation had begun their long march rightward. But in this hypothetical, an undemocratic mechanism would be invoked to block generational reorientation of the party. This would clarify the authoritarian, exclusionary tendencies of the Democratic Party and the larger political system, but this has its risks, as it can radicalize those who are excluded. On the other hand, what if a populist candidate were let through? Undoubtedly the centrists would try to charm, buy off, or threaten the populist (already we are seeing this happen with de Blasio) and this might even work, but at the expense of infuriating the said populists' base. And what if the populist won, and even tried to move forward on a program? What then? I suspect the center would work with the right through all possible avenues--the legislature, the judiciary, the media, etc--to frustrate and even topple the populist. I wonder if the Democratic Party could survive this scenario. At least since Bill Clinton (or even Jimmy Carter) the Democratic Party has pushed center-right policies while offering shelter to various social movements (feminism, civil rights, labor, etc) terrified of the right wing and its strength in the Republican Party. As the focus of popular anger turns towards economic policies, the centrists increasingly seem like the enemy. This is the contradiction the Democrats will struggle to contain.Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2887778771340517429.post-64108346899122795452013-10-18T17:08:00.000-07:002013-10-22T19:19:25.436-07:00Should the Left be Jealous of the Tea Party?Several writers, notably <a href="http://jacobinmag.com/2013/10/the-shadow-right/">Alex Gourevitch</a> and <a href="http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2013/10/a-revolution-is-not-a-dinner-party-but-it-might-be-a-tea-party.html">Jodi Dean</a>, seem to think so, since the Tea Party has proven capable of collective political action that makes an impact. My answer would be no. I am about as envious of the Tea Party as I am of the vicious resistance mounted to integration in the South or the terrorist attacks of September 11. Both made a real impact, but neither molded the political future. The Tea Party is fairly isolated among one demographic, albeit a powerful one, older white men, relatively well-to-do, although not for the most part the very wealthiest. Ideologically, it has isolated itself from the American public, which turned against the Republicans during the government shutdown. It's effort to basically use extortion and threats to stop the Affordable Care Act, precisely what the Republicans ran on and lost in 2012, bombed. They got nothing. Their main accomplishment, such as it is, was to demonstrate that they are presently powerful enough to throw a wrench into the working of the US government. They came pretty close to triggering a default on US debt, which I sensed that they welcomed. Notwithstanding the failure of this strategy, I believe their nihilism will sustain them. If they are losing the country (and they believe, with some justification, that they are), then they would just as soon destroy it. It is not obvious, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/blame_the_constitution/">within the constraints of the American political system</a>, precisely how to stop them. The more corporate faction of the Republicans may start in earnest to push back and try to unseat them, but people on the left tend to underestimate the way the base of a party can express itself through primaries. Lots of Tea Partiers won in primaries where their rivals had more money.<br />
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Over the next ten years, the US political system will probably become more authoritarian as this congressional obstacle proves insurmountable. Congress does not have a good image, to say the least, although it is a far more democratic institution than the presidency or the supreme court. The "Common Core" educational standards provide a model for how this might work. Even without the Tea Party, it probably would not be possible to pass such a program. So its development was outsourced to David Coleman, it promotion was outsourced to Bill Gates, and centrist media has been relentless in promoting them as something any right thinking American concerned about the future will go along with. The big problem is that this leaves the centrist program with even less of a fig leaf of popular approval than when it is directly promoted by Bill Clinton, Barak Obama, Nancy Pelosi, etc. So opposition to this soft authoritarianism will provide one avenue for the left.<br />
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Second, the deterioration of the Republican Party as a coherent, disciplined vehicle means that the left can sometimes stop bad things by de facto alliances with the Tea Party. This is what slowed the war drive to Syria, and it is also what tanked Larry Summers appointment to the Federal Reserve. Had Obama been able to count on the centrist Republicans whipping the party in line, both probably would move forward. I suspect this will also undermine any near-future "grand bargain," as well as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, although in both cases the intransigence of the Tea Partiers alone might do the trick (Obama's cancellation of his trip to the Pacific to deal with the shutdown didn't help claims that the US would lead the region in the future).<br />
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Finally, the crumbling of the right into this isolated, dysfunctional mess, rather than inspiring envy, should embolden the left. They don't want this country, increasingly consisting of non-whites, and longing for government solutions to their problems? Fine, we will take it. Taking it will require both a careful accounting of where we are at and the challenges of actually trying to enact progressive change (something missing in both Dean and Gorevitch's posts), and a serious investigation as to how the left should act in the case that the US state breaks down under the weight of Tea Party style battering. The latter may come sooner than expected.Steven Shermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11669565039860238078noreply@blogger.com0